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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/confusing-unlikable-and-on-the-nose).

**John August:** Hello, and welcome. My name is John August.

**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 232 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, we will talk about terrible notes screenwriters get and what happens when novelists attempt to adapt their own books.

Craig, welcome back to your home little set-up, your office. We are now on Skype, we don’t have to see each other in person anymore.

**Craig:** Yeah. Always awkward to look into the face of John August —

**John:** Yeah

**Craig:** To see his dead eyes, to hear the words and clicks as the babbage machine inside his dome calculates what to say next.

**John:** Yeah, Mathew has a whole special filter that takes that out when I record by Skype. But live, you know, there’s no way to really conceal it.

**Craig:** You can’t conceal the babbage.

**John:** There was enough bustling in that auditorium there that nobody really heard it.

**Craig:** No one except for me.

**John:** Yeah. How did you feel Austin went?

**Craig:** I thought Austin went great. It may be my favorite of all the Austins I’ve been to. And it started off on a weird foot because they had this storm and the airport got shut down. So you and I weirdly kind of got in under the wire and got out after the wire. I mean, compared to everybody else, we had the easiest travel of all time.

But I thought it went really, really well. You know, we had to do a little rejiggering on our live podcast because of the travel issues and other things. But we got two great guests regardless. I thought our Three Page Challenge went really well.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then I enjoyed doing my seminar on story structure. That seemed to go really well. And it was just fun seeing people. It was a good group. Lots of old faces, some new faces. Oh, and our wives and husbands were with us.

**John:** Yeah, which was fun for the first time to have them there with us.

**Craig:** Here’s a question for you. I don’t know if this happened for you, but I was kind of hoping it would happen for me, and it did. And that is — just every now and then, the person that you’ve been spending your life with, you know, at this point now with Melissa it’s more than half of my life, it’s good for them to see you in like another context —

**John:** For sure.

**Craig:** And see people like, “Hey,” you know. It makes them kind of — I don’t know, just appreciate the other side.

**John:** There’s always this question in my head. It was whether Mike really believes I am where I say I am, or that if I’ve actually hidden my phone in some other city and I’m a spy living some other secret life. So it’s good for him to see like, “Oh, those places I talk about going, they are actually real and there are people on the other side of that conversation.”

**Craig:** I’m glad that I’m not the only one because, you know, the joke that Melissa and I always have is that there’s this recurring plot on Lifetime made-for-TV movies where a woman meets a man and he’s the man of her dreams, and he just seems so perfect, and then she starts to realize over time that he’s been drugging her every day and confusing her and having sex with her in her sleep. And then cheating on her, manipulating her, and stealing her money. And every now and then, she’s like, “Are you drugging me? Is this real or is this drugs?”

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So at least Melissa got to know for sure that it was drugs.

**Craig:** Yeah. Oh, it’s drugs. We didn’t —

**John:** 100 percent. It’s drugs from top to bottom.

**Craig:** We blindfolded Mike and Melissa and just brought them to a room that where we hastily scrawled Austin on the wall and then just kept them high as hell for a few days. It was great.

**John:** Yeah, it was a fun time.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** So people have already listened to the live show that we did, that was last week’s episode. The Three Page Challenge we did, that is now up in the premium feed. So if you’re a premium subscriber to Scriptnotes, you can listen to our Three Page Challenge where we had three really interesting scripts to talk through and we got to talk with two of the writers of those scripts and about what they had done. So Kelly Marcel was our special guest for that.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** If you are not a premium subscriber, this may be a good time for you to run over to scriptnotes.net and sign up for that. It’s $1.99 a month. You get access to all the back feed and episodes like the Scriptnotes live Three Page Challenge. And also an interview I did with Drew Goddard for the Writers Guild Foundation last week. And so that will be up in the feed by the time you hear this. So a good chance to catch up on things you may have missed.

**Craig:** Wonderful.

**John:** All right. Our future guest, Tess Morris, she’s a young woman we met at Austin this year. She’s a friend of Kelly Marcel. She was there with a movie called Man Up, which was having it’s, I guess, North American premier at Austin. But that film is actually going to be showing at Sundance Cinemas here in Los Angeles starting, I think, next week, when you listen to this podcast. And we are going to have her as a guest on the show. So if you would like to understand what we’re talking about, I would recommend you go out and see her movie. It stars Lake Bell and Simon Pegg. And that’s premiering in New York and Los Angeles I think next week. So just to give you a heads up that that’s a future topic, so if you want to know what we’re talking about, you should probably go see her movie, which is really good.

**Craig:** I think it’s safe to say that she’s delightful.

**John:** She is in fact delightful. She’s British and delightful. But delightful in a different way than Kelly Marcel.

**Craig:** Everyone is.

**John:** Yes. [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs] That one is unique. No, Melissa kept saying about Tess, she just kept saying, “I’m sorry, but she is adorable.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** She is adorable. And the funny is you said she’s a young woman. She’s not that much younger than we are.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** But she seems like she is, like you want to adopt her and, you know, I keep saying like, “Come stay with us, you could be just our older daughter.”

**John:** It’s interesting because the character that Lake Bell plays in the movie is very clearly inspired by Tess. And it is a woman who is very immature in sort of fundamental things and makes a list about sort of like act like a grown up, and that seems to be a goal for Tess as well. And so, we could talk about being a grown-up, and especially romantic comedies, which is a thing that Tess has essentially written a thesis on about how romantic comedies function and what their function is in the cinema universe. So that’ll be a great conversation we’ll have with her, eventually. And it’ll make more sense if you see her movie first.

**Craig:** Word, word.

**John:** Another clip you may want to watch is online. It’s from Andrew Friedhof who just won the Nicholl Fellowship for his script. And he gave this really nice acceptance speech. So Robin Swicord introduced him. It was a nice acceptance speech. And at the end of it, he thanks you and me, which was just crazy.

**Craig:** It was. And it was very touching. And he seems, first of all, like the nicest person ever, you know. Sometimes you see somebody and they’re talking and you think, “I don’t know what it is exactly but they just seem so gentle and so kind and so nice.” And he said some very lovely things about you and me and the show. And it was very touching, you know. I mean, you know my whole thing these days is being grateful, and I’m very grateful for that. I’m grateful that we — and he’s Australian and, you know, his point was like, “Look, we’re all the way there on the other side of the world from Los Angeles.” And so, these things, like the show that we do, and there are a lot of other resources, obviously, are lifelines for people. And so it was very nice to hear, and it keeps me going week after week. I have no idea what keeps you going, some sort of blend of synthetic oil and jet fuel.

**John:** Absolutely. It’s a special formula that I’ve been working on for years. I mean, actually, through the power of radio, we don’t have to summarize what he said, we can actually just play a little clip. So let’s hear a little clip of what he said —

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** About us.

**Andrew Friedhof:** On the off chance they hear this, I’d like to thank John August and Craig Mazin. I consider myself a proud alumnus of Scriptnotes University, particularly for someone from overseas who doesn’t live in this area, obviously. So yeah, to actually have their advice, umbrage-filled advice, has been invaluable to me, so I really appreciate that.

**John:** So that was lovely. So Andrew, I connected with him on Twitter, so he’s in town for a little while longer doing a thousand meetings, he’s doing The Water Bottle Tour of Los Angeles, which we’ve described. And so we wish him lots of luck and congratulations on this success for him.

**Craig:** No question, it’s exciting. And you know, look, there’s a little side effect of the show that we do here, and that’s when we’re both old, I feel like there’ll just be a wave of screenwriters who will take care of us, who’ll bring us hot meals, you know, blankets.

**John:** I mostly just want people to be a little bit sad when I die. That’s really my only goal.

**Craig:** I don’t know if they will, because you’re not going to really die. You’re just going to, you know, stop working.

**John:** Yeah, that’s true. I’ll actually multiply. I’ll be some sort of underlying A.I. that’s just floating out there in the universe.

**Craig:** You’ll just keep getting parts replaced until people are like, “Yes, technically, it’s John August, but it’s not. There’s barely anything left of the original, of the one.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, this thing has been built up over centuries.

**John:** Yeah, because I’m Skynet basically.

**Craig:** [laughs] You become Skynet. Oh, I, on the other hand, will be dead. [laughs]

**John:** You’ll die in some like really embarrassing accident.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’ll die of explosive diarrhea —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** In front of a crowd, yeah.

**John:** [laughs] That was good.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** My last bit of follow-up is, a couple of weeks ago I talked about that I was thinking about doing NaNoWriMo, where you try to write a novel in the month of November? And I’m actually doing it. I had to start it while I was in Austin, but I’ve actually kept up my word count, and so if people want to stalk me and see how much I’m actually writing per day, I will put a link in the show notes to my official NaNoWriMo profile where you can see how much I am writing each day.

And it’s been really interesting, because you and I have both written some fiction, and I don’t know about you, but I find it challenging overall to switch gears and just be in pure prose the whole time.

**Craig:** It’s very challenging. You certainly feel like you have let go of that comforting structure, that — I mean, there’s just a rhythm to screenwriting, and it’s the rhythm of scenes more than anything.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** A scene feels like a bite size accomplishable thing to do. It has its own beginning, middle, and end. Screenwriting is all about propulsive motion of some kind, emotional or narrative. And in novels, that is occasionally there, and sometimes it’s the last thing you want to do. You want to be reflective, you want to change the vibe completely. So it’s a far less structured form of writing, and that can be a little scary at times. I mean, I have no idea why you’re doing this. It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard. I don’t understand it. [laughs] Honestly, I hope it wins the Pulitzer.

**John:** Thank you. I’m not trying to write the Pulitzer book, but I’m enjoying what I’m writing.

One of the things I have noticed is that I’m looking at sort of what the feeling is, as the cursor is blinking. And a difference between screenwriting and writing prose is when you’re screenwriting it’s very clear what state you’re in. So am I in a line of action or in a line of dialogue? And your brain switches gears for like what you’re trying to do there. And in prose, you could sort of be in both. And so as I’m trying to express a character communicating some information, it’s like, “Oh, am I going to do that through dialogue or am I going to do that through a summary of sort of what the conversation was?” Am I going to step outside of the actual moment I’m in to fill in details about someone’s history or, you know, an anecdote that relates to that moment? It’s a very different set of states in writing prose fiction than writing screenwriting. Just on the level of what’s happening right underneath your cursor.

**Craig:** Yes. That’s absolutely true. I remembered thinking, when I was writing prose, that I also had this option to shift gears dramatically in terms of the way the story was being relayed to the reader. In film, you can’t, because you understand people are going to have to shoot this. Ultimately, it conforms to reality. When you’re writing prose, you can slip into a dream state at any moment. You can slip inside someone’s mind, you can slip inside a memory, and you can shift those gears tonally. In fact, you want to. You want to keep people on their toes a little bit. And there is the beautiful freedom of choice. And of course, the terrifying freedom of choice.

**John:** Yeah. It is. The switch of tenses is also a thing that you have to wrestle with when you first get used to it. Screenwriting is written entirely in the present tense, and that’s because everything you’re seeing on screen is happening right there at that moment. Most fiction is written in the third person singular. And it’s interesting, there’s that change of voice, that change of having to decide whether you are an omniscient narrator who knows everything about the characters, whether you’re limiting your perspective onto a certain character, whether you are invoking the second person to say you at times, in that sort of casual way, rather than saying one might notice, like you might see all those choices are interesting and you find yourself having to make them for the first time, and then having to decide, is that the right choice for the rest of the book I’m trying to write?

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s yet another thing that you can even switch. You know, Stephen King has this stylistic quirk that I kind of love where he’ll write traditional prose, third person, past tense. And then suddenly somebody will start thinking something, and now he’s in first person, present tense.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And he’ll slather a bunch of italics over it. And stuff like that is kind of fun, because you start to realize, “Oh, yeah, that’s right, the writing is the movie.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There is no movie. This is it. So I might as well have some fun and break a bunch of rules, as long as — you know, as long as you know what you’re doing and it’s all intentional. It’s so much fun. I don’t know. I mean, one day, I have to get back to —

**John:** One day, you’ll finish your book.

**Craig:** One day, I’ll finish my book. And it’ll be probably around the time that all these Scriptnotes listeners have grown up, become wealthy, and are bringing me soup and blankets.

**John:** Yeah. But at least you’ll have something to do while you are waiting for your stories to begin.

**Craig:** But let’s not kid ourselves [laughs]. I am going to be playing Fallout 12.

**John:** That’s what you’ll do. 100 percent.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Or The Room Part 46.

**Craig:** Oh, I mean, well, just wait —

**John:** Just wait.

**Craig:** Just wait.

**John:** The last thing we need we need to do in our follow-up is talk about the death Melissa Mathison, so the screenwriter of E.T., Indian in the Cupboard, The Black Stallion. E.T. is one of those really seminal movies for me. It’s one of those things where I realized like, “Oh, this is a movie, and it’s making me feel things.” And that comes from her script.

**Craig:** Well, it’s a seminal movie for practically everyone, I think. And one of the reasons why is that it — and this is where, you know, when you get a great screenwriter with a great idea. And she did invent E.T. You can instruct culture about how you can look at a genre in a different way. And to say, “I’m going to make a family movie about a little boy who meets a friendly alien,” and make it really the “Jesus” story, make it the gospel frankly —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And to do it beautifully and touchingly, to present a family with a single mother, where that’s not kind of a thing that is a thing, it’s just that’s life —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** To have kids that talk like actual kids. It was beautiful. And if that were all that Melissa had done, it would have been enough. But to have also done Black Stallion and Indian in the Cupboard and Kundun, just remarkable. I mean, the breadth of her career, the different kinds of stories she did, worked with — you know, repeatedly worked with the best directors. Her last work is an adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The BFG which Spielberg, I think, is going to do. And that says something right there. You know, when arguably the best Hollywood director ever works with you in the early 1980s and then is working with you in the mid-2010s, you probably are pretty good. I mean, she was one of the best who ever did what we did. And it’s very sad because it’s untimely. I don’t know if they indicated what the cause of death of was, but she was in her 60s. It’s too early. I assume that it was some kind of illness, and it’s a shame. And everyone, certainly everyone who screenwrites needs to know her name. But everybody who loves movies needs to know her name.

**John:** Absolutely.

All right. Let’s switch gears and talk about studio notes. Or not even notes we get from studios but from other people who read our scripts. And the notes that drive us craziest because they are so unhelpful or unspecific. And we each have a list of some things that drive us crazy. Craig, why don’t you start?

**Craig:** Hey, I’m going to just zero in on the one.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** That after all this time, this is the one that — it’s the only one of all the repetitive, useless, silly, boring, edge rubbing off notes that you get, and you’re going to get them. This is the one that sends me into advanced umbrage. And it’s this. “This character feels unlikeable.” Even as I say it, there is a rage building in me, a violence that I can barely repress. And the reason why is because a lot of notes that you get that are bad are — they’re what I call conforming notes.

“Please remove the things that are unique in your screenplay and push them more towards something I’ve seen already because it makes me feel safe. I simply can’t look past my own fear to the experience of the audience. It’s more important to me that I feel safe.” And I understand why those happen, and of course, part of my job is to not let bad things happen to the screenplay while making the other person feel safe. But this note — this note is just stupid, because it doesn’t even make you feel safe. It’s just wrong.

Not only can your character be unlikeable, people like your character to be unlikeable. They love unlikeable characters. The only thing they ever ask of us is that unlikeable characters at some point indicate that they are self-aware, that they know that they’re a little off. And that there is a hint in there, a thread that you can see can be pulled to lead to redeemability, to redemption. And that the character does, in fact, unfold into something of a likeable person. They don’t have to become a good person, but that you can see some humanity comes out. We love curmudgeons. We love the cranky drunks. We love the vulgarians and the addicts and the criminals and the cowards and the neurotics and the selfish. I mean, look back at Bad News Bears.

**John:** Oh, yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, I want to carry with me a poster of Bad News Bears. And the next time someone says, “Well, I think this character isn’t quite likeable,” I’m just going to unfold it, circle Walter Matthau’s face and then smoosh that into their face so that whatever the sharpie I used to circle Walter Matthau’s face makes a weird sharpie smudge on their face and they got to walk around all day. And every time someone says, “Well, what’s with the sharpie smudge?” They go, “Oh, yeah, I said that a character should be likeable.” And they’ll be like, “Really? What about Walter Matthau?” And they’ll say, “Yeah. That’s where I got this.”

**John:** So it’ll be sort of like Ash Wednesday where people have smears on their faces but it’ll be the sort of — it’s the Sharpie Tuesday.

**Craig:** It’s Umbrage Tuesday.

**John:** It’s Umbrage Tuesday. It’s a new holiday that we’re instituting in Hollywood.

**Craig:** By the way, how great is it that Andrew Friedhof actually mentioned umbrage in his Nicholl speech? [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Yeah, I know. If you just patented that word, I mean, we could have made some money here but no.

**Craig:** So much money.

**John:** You gave it away for free.

**Craig:** As you know, I insist on losing money.

**John:** So let’s try to unpack likeability, because I think when a studio development executive or a producer says “unlikeable,” let’s take a look at what they’re actually trying to say. I think sometimes they’re trying to say that they worry that an audience will see this character, not relate to this character, and will not want to follow him or her on their story. And unlikeable tends to be a note that you get at a character’s — not first introduction but early on as a character is going. And they’re worried that the audience is not going to go on the ride with the character because of things they’re saying, things they’re doing, that they are not engaged in the right way. So sometimes it’s because they’re taking actions which are offensive. But sometimes it’s because they’re not giving you anything to hold on to.

Is that where you see people using the word unlikeable?

**Craig:** I think so. But it seems to me that it’s almost more of a knee-jerk thing of they think that audiences are simple and have only two positions on their dial which is “Aw” and “Ew.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And that’s it. But that’s not true. In fact, “Ew,” contains an enormous amount of “Aw.” Take a look at Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets. He throws a dog down the garbage shoot. He’s homophobic. He’s racist. He’s mean. He’s cruel. He yells at children. And you love him because you can see under it “aw”.

So like I just said here, the character has self-awareness or a sense of redeemability. You see when he’s alone that he has a mental illness and that he’s struggling and you go, “Aw.” And we want that. We want it. And I just feel that sometimes — in truth, there is no redemption for this note. If you say to me — and I don’t get it a lot, but if you say, “Well, this character isn’t very likeable,” in my mind, you’re dead.

I don’t know how else to put it. You’re dead, because you have no risk in you. You have no interest in any kind of true complication to a person. Because the only people, I think, we are interested in in movies are the ones that have something about them that is unlikeable. I can go down movie by movie. You give me any movie, any character, I’m going to go, “Oh, there’s the thing that’s unlikeable about them.”

How much did you love Meryl Streep’s character in Doubt?

**John:** Oh, yeah. I understood where she was coming from. And that was the crucial distinction. If I understand what’s making them tick, I am fascinated and I like them even if I wouldn’t necessarily want to be in a room with them.

**Craig:** Right. Because there is also the implication that underneath the crust is something else. And then the question, why is the crust even there? You know, we want it. We want it. It’s just so weird. If anything, if I were in their position, I would give the note “This character is too likeable.”

This woman is just too — I like her so much. Why do I need to see her go through anything? Just leave her be, you know.

**John:** I think the other kind of unlikeability that people are confusing here is — so there’s how the reader/audience feels about the character. But it’s also how the characters within the universe respond to that character and how they’re responding to what he or she is doing.

So when you said Meryl Streep, I was thinking about Devil Wears Prada which is, again, an incredibly, on the surface, unlikeable character in the sense that like the people around her don’t like her. But because she’s functioning as a villain, that’s good. And that’s sort of what you’re going for.

Real life experience that I had, you know, for the last 15 years is the character of Will in Big Fish. So in the movie version that’s Billy Crudup’s character. And the notes I got from very early versions of the script and sort of all the way through the process is like, “We don’t like Will.” And it’s like, “Well, that’s fantastic because Will is basically me, so thank you for making me feel great about that.” I feel great about myself.

But I kept trying to unpack what people meant when they said that the character Will was unlikeable. And what they’re really saying is, “We really like Edward. And Will seems to be an obstacle to Edward. And that doesn’t make us feel happy. So something is wrong.” And what I was trying to communicate is like, “Well, they are serving as a protagonist-antagonist relationship. They’re going to push each other, and that is their function, and it’s what we’re trying to do.”

It wasn’t until we got to — in the musical version, we were in Chicago and we were still wrestling with this note, people said like, “We don’t like Will.” And we cast the most charismatic lovely actor you could imagine, Bobby Steggert. And people still would come to this note saying, “We don’t like Will.”

And ultimately what we discovered is people didn’t understand what was going on inside Will’s head. And that’s where we had to write a whole new song called Stranger which lets you actually — it give him an “I want” song that lets you sort of understand what it is he’s trying to do. And in writing that song and building the first act around that, suddenly all those “Will is unlikeable” notes started to go away. So I think a lot of times, when you’re hearing that likeability note, it’s that they’re confused about what the character is actually after or what the function of that character is in the story.

**Craig:** Right. And that’s how I get around it, usually. I mean, I think to myself, well, “I don’t want you to like anyone in my movie. I want you to hate them and love them both at the same time.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And you know, there’s that line, Sondheim’s line from Into the Woods, “You’re not good, you’re not bad, you’re just nice.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Nice is bad.

**John:** Nice is so bad.

**Craig:** We don’t want nice. I don’t want you to like anyone. And so you’re right, if they’re saying, “Well, I just don’t like him,” I think then part of the job is to say, “Here’s how I can make the audience engage with this person’s crustiness, with the bad part of them, with the part that’s kind of awful.” The “Ew” needs the “Aw,” you know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And you just got to figure out how to get it in there so that you are delighted by them. And we know. Here’s the thing, that’s why this note makes me crazy. We know from a hundred years of cinema that audiences love villains. They love villains. They love them, you know. Usually, it’s your favorite part, you know. I mean, I think back to seeing Superman as a kid, Donner’s Superman. I mean, Gene Hackman makes the movie. I hate him and I love him. He’s awesome, you know.

And I don’t know, this is the one note that sends me over the moon. And so if you are a notes giver, I want you to strike this. Strike it away. And if you encounter a character that you’re not liking but you’re also not deliciously hating, then give that note. Say, “I want to really not like and love this person.” I want “Ew” and “Aw.”

**John:** The other thing I want to urge note givers to do is you’re not allowed to ask for likeability and edgy at the same time. And I so often find I’ll be in a conversation, like, “Could we just make this edgier but also make the characters likeable?” And those are conflicting notes and you will have nothing but tears if you try to do both things simultaneously.

**Craig:** Yeah. Notes like that, they are a cry for help. I really do believe that.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** They are. This person is no longer thinking about a movie. They’re just frightened to death. And Lindsay Doran used to run Sydney Pollack’s company. And she said that Sydney had this thing where Lindsay would say, “I want this character to be — I want to love him but I also want him to be edgy.” And Sydney would say, “So you want a close up with feet?”

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** And that’s it. It’s like you can’t.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You can’t have a close up with feet. But when I’m working with her —

**John:** You can frame it in kind of an impossible shot that would do it. Like if it was a yoga teacher, I could see what the close up would be.

**Craig:** [laughs] Exactly. And she we do this all the time to me. She would say something to me and I go, “That’s a close up with feet.” And you know what she would say that was amazing? She’d go, “I know but I want it.” And I would start to think, “Well —

**John:** If Lindsay wants it, you got to do it.

**Craig:** I wonder if there’s a way to make a close up with feet here. Or it would actually make me start thinking about how to be interesting and clever about certain things. But you know, she is not doing this, what you’re talking about. The edgy and likeable thing really is a cry for help.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Using the word edgy alone is a cry for help. It’s an indication that you’re drowning and maybe this business isn’t for you. I mean, one of the great episodes of The Simpsons was the Poochie episode.

**John:** Oh, just absolutely the best episode.

**Craig:** It’s seminal. It’s really important. And I mean that. It’s important for anyone to watch, to understand, how the kind of banal villain of Hollywood works. They want something that’s edgy. They want a paradigm shift. They want it to break the mold. And they want it to be out of the box.

They don’t know what any of these things mean. It’s ridiculous. Never. Never. Never ever say — don’t say edgy. There’s other words. There are better words that mean something. I don’t know what the hell edgy even means.

**John:** No one knows. The other thing I don’t know what it means is confusing. And so, this is a note I will get saying like “This section is confusing” or “I like it but it’s confusing.” And whenever they’re saying “It’s confusing,” I try to sort out whether they’re saying, “I am confused” or “I’m worried that a theoretical audience will be confused.” Because when you actually ask that question, you can suss out whether there’s something that they fundamentally didn’t get that I actually need as a writer to fix in there so they actually understand sort of what the intention is. Or are they just worried that the audience is so much stupider than they are that the audience won’t understand what something is going to be. And they want to dumb it down for the audience.

And what’s frustrating about the “It’s confusing” note is that confusion by itself is not a bad thing. If you look at the stories you love, at certain points in any story you’re going to be confused and your confusion leads to curiosity. And curiosity makes you lean into the movie and really care about what’s happening next. It makes you want to solve the problem. If everything is just completely straightforward and you sort of know what’s going to happen the whole time, there’s no point in watching the movie.

So the trick for the screenwriter is balancing confusion with, you know, clarity so that the audience and the reader feel like they know enough about what’s happening right now, but they’re really curios about how these things are going to resolve. And the answers to those questions are going to be hopefully rewarding. And that’s my frustration with confusion is that so often underneath that note is the desire to smooth out any possible wrinkles.

**Craig:** Well, you know, you said a lot of things that are very insightful here. And I think that what’s really underneath it and what really bothers me about this note, at least for me, is that there’s a hubris involved. Because you’re right. What you’re saying — you’re asking a first question which is, when you say “It is confusing” like that’s a fact, are you saying, “I am confused” or are you predicting that an audience member would be confused?

And furthermore, when you say this blithely, are you saying it in ignorance of the fact that this question is the one that we preoccupy ourselves almost the most with. The titration of information is the name of the game for screenwriting. What do I tell you? How much do I tell you? How much do I mislead? How much do I conceal? How much do I misdirect? We’re thinking about this all the time.

So yes, every now and then, we’re going to get it wrong. You and I see this when we see Three Page Challenges and we’ll often comment, “Well, we’ve crossed the line from mysterious into befuddling,” you know. And so mystery good, befuddling bad. And what is the factor that rules over everything? Intention. As long as you’re intending me to feel this, great. If you weren’t intending me to feel this, bad. That’s a great discussion.

When these people, when they wander in and they’re like, “Well, I read this part. It was confusing.” No. No, no, no. You don’t get to say it like that. Ever. Because you are discounting that there’s so much more calculation that went into this than you can imagine.

What you need to say is either, “I was confused, so let’s figure out how to match intention to result.” Or you need to say, “I am worried that an audience will be confused by this.” At which point, I often say things like, “I’ll tell you what, let’s put some things in here that are modular.” We know we can lift them if we need to so we’re not stuck with them. But if this section needs training wheels for people, here’s some training wheels. And if it doesn’t, we won’t have to use it, right? We’ll have the option. Because I’m thinking about that all the time. And the truth is I’ve never been to a test screening where at least, at some point, the audience was confused by something that I thought was going to be painfully obvious and thought something that I thought was going to be really mysterious was painfully obvious. It’s like you are always surprised at some point, so I get that.

But the hubris involved of just saying “It is confusing.” No, you are an idiot.

**John:** Yeah. It’s a state. And whether that state is internal to the person or inherent to the text. I think most development executives are comfortable talking about a character arc. And so when we talk about likeability, we talk about, you know, hopefully we go from this place where we see the character in this one state and they grow and become a better person at the end of the story.

Well, stories have an arc as well. And so there should be confusion. It should be murky and befuddling. And it should arrive at a point of clarity, hopefully, by the end. And so sometimes you can deflect some of those confusion notes with “This is the point. This is the journey of the story. This is how the mystery is unfolding.” And if you can do that and talk about it, usually with character intention, and make sure that it’s really clear what the characters are trying to do moment by moment. Some of that confusion goes away.

Oftentimes, I like to do what’s called a freeze frame where you just, like, look, stop a scene and like look at all the characters on the screen. And just point to each one and say, like, “What is that character trying to do?” And if you don’t know what the characters are trying to do, you do have a problem. That’s really a reason to stop and rethink what’s going on there. But if you understand what all the characters are trying to do, it’s okay that what’s going to happen next in the story is a little confusing. As long as you believe that the characters know what they’re attempting to do next.

**Craig:** Exactly. Exactly.

**John:** Oh, these notes. All these notes. This all ties in very well to an article that you flagged for us. This comes from Slate by Forrest Wickman called Against Subtlety. And do you want to summarize Forrest’s argument here?

**Craig:** Well, it’s a bit long. I guess we’ll zero in on the part that I found kind of cut to his thesis here. He was talking about, I guess, our evolution in our relationship with things that are subtle versus things that are on-the-nose. He says, you know, it was once true that saying that something was “on-the-nose” was actually kind of a good thing. It’s like, “Great, you nailed it.” [laughs]

So he says, “A reasonably as a decade ago, ‘on-the-nose’ typically meant something positive. Most dictionaries haven’t even added the new definition yet, keeping instead only the century-old meaning of ‘exactly right’ or ‘on target.’ Now, calling out the on-the-noseness is practically its own sport. We spot it in a callback to an eight-year-old episode of Mad Men, the title of an episode of Wayward Pines, the appearance of some portentous-seeming oranges in Breaking Bad, or even the lighting and staging of Nashville.

“And so we mock obvious symbolism. We cringe at message movies and melodrama and novels that too readily reveal what they mean. And we roll our eyes at too-clear subtextual signaling even when we sit down to watch wonderfully unsubtle programs on TV. If we no longer hold the high above the low, why do we still hold the subtle above the unsubtle?”

So he’s coming at this — and I understand there is kind of a thing where you think, “Well, if I got it then it couldn’t have been that interesting, so it’s bad.” [laughs] You know, I mean, whereas things that are — I guess, the average person’s cynical viewpoint of the fancy moviegoer is somebody that likes to sit in the movie that makes absolutely no damn sense whatsoever, and then walk out and go, “Yes. Yes. Intriguing. I think what he was trying to say…” And so he is kind of taking the other side of that.

**John:** Another way of looking at it is by fetishizing subtlety, we are encouraging filmmakers to sort of not actually be clear at times. Or just sort of actually not make the point. Like, if you made the point then you’ve missed you the point in a strange way.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that is, I think, a dangerous thing to do. And it ties very well into this idea of confusion. And sort of, you know, you sort of leave with these muddled messes that sort of don’t quite arrive anywhere. And you say like, “Oh, it was very subtle.” It’s like, “Yeah, but we didn’t actually get anywhere.” And that can be a real challenge.

**Craig:** Well, I think that Mr. Wickman is making a slight mistake here in his essay and it’s a mistake of perspective. Because when he’s talking about “we,” I think what he means is we, the people who are critics, not reviewers, but engage in, you know, cinematic criticism of films or content. That we, on our side over here, are struggling with this. And I would respond that “you” on the other side over there are struggling with a lot of things. And that, in fact, audiences and writers understand that they have engaged in a contract whereby some things will be made clear.

Clumsy symbolism is a thing. We all know clumsy symbolism, but that doesn’t — the problem with clumsy symbolism isn’t that we hate being informed or that we hate that something is revealed to us. It’s that it’s bad. So the example that comes to mind, although he is a, you know, a giant of cinema, Martin Scorsese put that rat in at the end of The Departed and I think everybody went, “Well, yeah. Yes, he is a rat.” You know, that just felt hamfisted.

But no, I don’t think audiences sit down and do what he’s describing audiences do. I think that these people do it. And it’s certainly of no great help to the creator of something. Obviously, we are again trying to gauge and do math, and just as I said, we’re always doing the calculus of how much information. We’re always doing the calculus of, “Okay. Well, how much of this stuff should be really indicative or subtle? How much of it should be things that people can tease out with each other on Reddit like a puzzle if we engage in that at all?”

But I don’t think that we, creating-wise, have a problem. And I don’t think the audience has a problem. I think that this is a problem of people who engage in critical analysis, because so often I think their profession comes down to say something new. And if everyone gets it, well then it’s not very new. Therefore, it must not be good. That’s where the logical mistake is made.

**John:** What you were talking about before in our confusion discussion, about how sometimes you will write additional things that will be modular, that we cab hopefully take out in case people are not getting them. Some of those things are designed to be less subtle. So like, if things are so subtle that no one is actually understanding what the point was, that’s where you put that thing back in that makes it less subtle. And you and I have both been through test screenings where after the test screenings it’s like, “Crap, we’re going to have to put in a line of ADR dialogue over somebody’s back to actually spell something out because people are just not fundamentally getting it.” That something was too subtle or was too easy to miss and therefore people can’t actually understand it.

I think one of the challenges about movies overall is that movies keep playing forward at 24 frames per second. So when you’re reading a book, you can stop and go back and flip through a few more pages and really dig into sort of what’s going on, really how it’s feeling, like how it’s landing for you. Like, did you miss something? Movies keep chugging along. So if you’re sitting in a dark theater, it has to make sense the first time through. And because of that, sometimes things can’t be quite as subtle as they would be in a book. And that’s a fundamental nature of movies.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The other thing I wanted to look at is, this essay is titled “Against Subtlety.” And I think — I’ll try to find the link to it, but there’s also another Slate article about “Against Against.” So this whole form of an argument is when you title your article against something, you have to sort of stake a big claim about sort of “This is the way things are and this is not the way things should be,” which is actually sort of absurd. And so there’s a middle ground which is it has to make enough sense for the audience to understand what the intention was but not be so obvious that it feels like you were just beating them over the head with it. And finding that line is really challenging especially when it’s not one artistic voice behind things but it’s a committee. A bunch of people have to come to an agreement about what those lines are going to be.

**Craig:** And furthermore, the arbiter is a population. It’s not an individual. So you can make the argument that if you create a piece of art and two out of ten people understand it and eight don’t, that you shouldn’t change it because you made it for those two people. The thing is, for what we do, we don’t have that luxury because people have invested not our money, we’re not paying for it. Other people are paying for it and they don’t settle for that. They want eight out ten people to understand it. They would really like ten out of ten people to understand it. So you don’t have the luxury of tuning yourself to the smartest or the most puzzle-oriented audience member.

You know, he cites some reviews of Spielberg’s movies. And one after another, they were accused of being heavy-handed, so was Hitchcock, so was Kubrick. Kubrick, for God’s sake. So is Wilder for God’s sake. And then he talks about how Great Gatsby initially was. Apparently, here are some phrases applied to it by critics when it came out. “Painfully forced. Not strikingly subtle.” And even in 2013, New York Magazine disdained the book for being, “Full of low-hanging symbols.”

Well, you know, I would like to punch New York Magazine right through itself. They aren’t full of low-hanging symbols. You know why we think Great Gatsby is full of low-hanging symbols? Because it’s instructed to us as children. And the way it’s instructed to us in part is through symbology.

The fact of the matter is that you don’t need to know that the glasses of T.J. Eckleburg — I think that’s his name — represent the eyes of God. Because as you read the book, they impart a certain feeling to you. I think the last person that wanted his book torn apart like that would be Fitzgerald. And yet that’s what literary analysis does. And now, it turns around and blames people for not being subtle enough because they figured it out. I don’t blame crossword puzzle creators for writing a crossword puzzle that I can solve.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s just dumb. And furthermore, I don’t need to solve movies. I can just have a feeling. I’m okay giving myself in and giving myself into a book and just thinking how eerie it is that those glasses seem to be there staring down, staring down. That’s a feeling. I don’t need to go further with it to enjoy the book. And I would argue that for most people that put some kind of evocative symbolism in their work, they don’t want it to be interpreted like an English teacher would either.

**John:** I think you’re absolutely right. The last thing I would say about the difference between film and other arts is that we make movies for big giant screens. And so sometimes you put things on a big giant screen, those symbols look really huge. And so your perspective on what that is telling you, it’s going to be very different based on the context of how you’re seeing it. But we also have to make our movies so that they make sense on an airplane seatback.

And so because we don’t have full control over what the experience will be when you’re seeing this film, you may make some choices that are going to split the difference, hopefully, in a way that suits most people seeing your film. And I think where I often find that is in the sound mix, because the sound mix is where you’re going to make sure that people are able to hear those crucial things that have to be heard even if it makes things a little less realistic.

The color mix will be the same kind of situation where you’re doing your color timing to figure out what the look of your film is going to be. Well, if you are on a great screen, you could go really dark and people will still be able to figure stuff out. But if you try to take that exact same color timing and play it on, you know, a crappy TV, you will not be able to see anything. And so there’s reasons why subtlety may not be possible because of the technological limitations.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I think this is why critics who consume culture at a rate and quantity far beyond what it’s intended will gravitate towards things that other people find confounding. Simply because they are doing that thing in their minds, that Groucho thing. Why would I want to be a member of any club that would have me as a member? Why would I want to like any movie that I understand?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I get it. So therefore, how good could that be?

**John:** Couldn’t be good at all.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Let’s do our last topic today which is books and novelists who adapt their own books. So this came up because just last week while I was in Austin, I was on a long phone call with an author whose book I really think is great. So he and I were having a conversation about the possibility of trying to make it into a movie. And it was an interesting conversation because he has also written screenplays. And so he was excited to have me potentially be involved. But he also wanted to write the screenplay himself. And that is a challenging discussion.

But it ended up being a really good discussion because I got to talk through, I think, some of the real pros and some of the real cons of novelists trying to adapt their own books. And Craig and I haven’t rehearsed this at all so I’m really curious what he thinks about it.

There have been good examples recently of authors adapting their own work. And sometimes being spectacularly good. So I’m thinking of Gillian Flynn with Gone Girl. I love the book. She did a great job adapting that for Fincher. And Emma Donoghue just did that with Room, which is her book. She wrote a great screenplay for that. But you also have J.K. Rowling who didn’t adapt the Harry Potter books. Steve Kloves did those, and I thought did a great job adapting those books and making a whole cinematic universe for those. And now, she has come around and she’s doing The Beasts and Where to Find Them, and that’s her first screenplay screenplay.

So there’s definitely, from this author’s perspective who I was talking to on Friday, I can see why he might be really into the idea of like, “Oh, I’ll do it myself because I actually know the characters. I know the world. I know the universe. I can protect my work to some degree.” And I had to sort of make the counter arguments about they’re fundamentally different forms. And that his trying to hold on to things from the book was ultimately going to hurt it at as a movie.

**Craig:** Well, first of all I love that you said that we didn’t rehearse this implying we’ve ever rehearsed anything. [laughs] Maybe you do. I literally have never rehearsed anything in my life.

**John:** Well, we did not pre-discuss. We haven’t talked through like sort of what our different talking points will be on this.

**Craig:** This is true. As it turns out, I am very sympathetic to your point of view on this. It is interesting. Traditionally, authors would not adapt their own novels because not only because there was the concern that maybe they’re moving into an art form that doesn’t really belong to them or isn’t their second nature but studios in particular I thought were very suspicious of this. Because, you know, their whole attitude is it’s a movie, I don’t care about this book. Sometimes they love every part of the book. Sometimes they just like the idea of the book.

I’m in the middle of adapting a book now that’s going to be a very loose adaptation. The prior adaptation of a book I did was an extraordinary loose adaptation because that’s what everybody agreed was the right thing to do. And in those cases, it’s quite evident that the last thing you want is the novelist doing that and I would imagine the last thing the novelist would want to do would be to do that. But there are these interesting new novelists now and you list three of them. Is it Gillian?

**John:** It’s Gillian. I looked it up.

**John:** I thought —

**John:** Because I heard someone say it and it’s Gillian Flynn.

**Craig:** So Gillian Flynn, Emma Donoghue, and J.K Rowling. All three of them, well two of them have already proved it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I suspect that Joanne Rowling is going to do a good job. She is incredibly smart. I mean, just so obviously smart and more importantly, she understands an audience I think better than practically any other novelist I’ve ever read. I love her books and she just knows the audience so well. Steve Kloves and I think Michael Goldenberg did one of them. All those movies were brilliantly screen-written. They kind of curated those novels gorgeously and even though those films were I think quite, quite loyal, I mean extraordinarily loyal to the novels, the screenwriters managed to kind of get the best of both worlds. And I suspect that she’s — I don’t know her, I would love to — but I suspect that she’s a student. And, you know, she’s often said that Hermione is her. Well, if she’s Hermione, she’s going to be a real student. She’s going to sit down and talk to people. She’s going to read those screenplays again. I bet she’s going to spend some time with Mr. Kloves to talk about how he did it and I bet she does a great job because she knows that it’s different.

**John:** Yeah, so I think there’s definitely examples of writers who are great at doing both things and to those writers, I say full speed ahead, all credit.

The conversation I had with this writer was about his book and how there were certain characters. Here’s a great example. I asked how old is this main character and he said, “Well, it’s written for kids who are, you know, 10 to 12 so sort of in that range. Readers really want to relate to somebody who is about their age or just a little bit older so in that range. It could be up to 14.” And I said, “How old is the character?” Because in a screenplay, a character is going to be one age. That character is going to be one actor. We’re going to cast somebody in that role. And it’s not going to be the audience. It’s going to be one actual actor and so we need to know how old that boy is and that’s going to fundamentally change the nature of the universe around him.

I had to ask about sort of these characters who are in the second and third act and what is their actual relationship, are they the same person, are they different things, are they manifestations of one thing or another? And it’s really fun in the book, because it’s sort of ambiguous. But I said, “It’s not going to be ambiguous in the movie. They’re going to have to be one thing or two things. It’s a fundamental question that has to be answered. ” He’s like, “Yeah, well, we’ll have to get to that.” The challenge is that like all the things that were delightfully ambiguous in the book could not be delightfully ambiguous in the movie because movies are one fixed expression of the possibilities that the book lays out.

**Craig:** Yeah, you certainly put your finger on it there. I mean, we talked about it earlier, part of the fun of writing in prose is anything is possible. And one of the miseries but also comforts of screenwriting is almost nothing is possible because you have to shoot it. You have to shoot it and so your job is to try and make impossible things appear on screen in possible ways. And similarly, you’ll see, I think, novels, novels can wander.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They can be very lax. They can expand and collapse moments as they wish. This becomes harder to do in movies particularly as you’re getting towards the end.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** When people simply need to go to the bathroom and they’re running out of patience because they aren’t reading this and then putting it down and calling someone on the phone. They are captive.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And so it is a different relationship that you have with them. It is an interesting thing and I think that there are probably — just as I would argue most screenwriters would make bad novelists, I would argue that most novelists would make bad screenwriters. There’s a reason we do what we do. And then of course there are those brilliant few, and hopefully you’re one of them, that can move between those two worlds. So, and I thought, you know, Gone Girl was a terrific example of how to do that.

**John:** Yeah, absolutely. And what she recognized in Gone Girl is that the essential conceit that she made the book where she had these alternating chapters and ultimately it broke and you sort of saw a revelation sort of at the midpoint. The movie was able to do that but it was only able to do that because it had built a very different rhythm going up to it and built enough goodwill in the audience that it was going to be able to make a huge change and have that be successful. And she had to build a really different engine to sort of get you through that huge shift that she’s made.

Emma Donoghue, you haven’t seen Room yet and I don’t want to spoil anything about it. Where I think — I mean, I think she really did a terrific adaptation. There are a few moments I quibbled with and I recognized that afterwards I think the reason why those didn’t work as well for me is because in the book version, you have full insight. You know what’s going on inside a character’s head and you recognize that the whole story ultimately becomes the boy’s perspective on sort of what the situation is and her misunderstanding, in some cases, of what the situation is. So when you see that in the movie though, you’re naturally going to be in a more third-person perspective. And so you’re seeing there are two scenes which I was watching and I didn’t understand why the characters were doing what they were doing. And I think I was sort of not supposed to because it’s really kind of in the boy’s point of view. And it was frustrating for the audience.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And frustrating for me. And that is a real limitation, I think, of sort of the medium. I don’t think it’s necessarily an easily solvable problem. I’m not saying a different screenwriter would have done a different or a better job of that, but it was a limitation that the form put on this story that wouldn’t have been there in the novel version.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think that adaptation is hard enough. When you’re self-adapting, the pitfalls are that many more and that deeper.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You just have to tread extremely carefully and you also in a weird way have to tread with great humility.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because the achievement of the novel does not guarantee the achievement of the screenplay in any way, shape, or form. You are essentially starting at esteemed zero.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So you just need to be aware of that.

**John:** If I could offer any thought for why a different screenwriter might not have hit that same trap is he or she would have maybe seen that like I’m not going to be able to communicate what’s really going on in the scene and therefore I can’t actually have this scene happen. I think you would have written through those sequences differently recognizing that the limitations you’re putting on yourself are going to make this scene which is probably really good in the book not actually make sense in this movie version.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** And again, it’s a challenge because that’s an incredibly successful popular book and the more popular a book is, the harder it is to change anything fundamental about the plot. And that is a real issue. Obviously, the Harry Potter books had to wrestle with that. Everyone knew every beat of those Harry Potter books. With Big Fish, no one had read that book and so I could change everything in that book and no one knew or cared. There was another book I was involved with where when I set it up, it was an obscure little book and then it became a much, much bigger book and it became clear that the things I thought I was going to need to change were not going to be possible to change because it was a bestseller and that’s a challenge.

**Craig:** No question. It’s really why I marvel actually at how good Kloves did. It’s kind of amazing because the books are enormous. And, you know, it’s funny, the first book wasn’t short. It wasn’t what I would call long. It was on the longer side for young adult fiction but then the books got bigger and bigger and bigger. By the time you got to the end, it was massive. And he just got it all, like he got everything you wanted. And you never felt cheated in any way. He understood that. And I think about this when I’m adapting things now. What I’m looking for are those moments when things change and the stuff in between them, you are going to have to compress and perhaps simplify. It’s the things that matter. Those are the things that you actually want to take all the time with. That’s why the book worked, you know.

**John:** Yeah, I think the biggest observation people have about the difference between the movies and the books is Ron’s character and something that is just dealing with sort of who you actually have in that role, and when you have a flesh and blood person in that part, he, to me, feels different in the movie than he does in the books. And I like them both but I think Kloves had to recognize this is who I have, these are the skills that this actor has, which are great, and I think that the character plays differently to me on screen than it does on the page. But they both work.

**Craig:** One thing that movies do better than anything is engage us emotionally. It’s a rare thing to read a book and start crying. It’s an incredibly common thing to see a movie and start crying.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I’ve cried at Adam Sandler movies. [laughs] I mean, on purpose. You know, they connect with us. So when you watch a Harry Potter film, Harry’s story occupies this enormous emotional space from who he is, how he was born, to what he must become, to the things he goes through. He is repeatedly tortured and tortured and tortured. And that is so effective that to then ask the audience to now look over here at this emotional space and this person’s internal life, “Isn’t this rough?” It is rough. It’s rough that Ron comes from a poor family and he’s on the bad end of a classist stick. It’s just not the same as your parents being murdered and you being the chosen one and have Voldemort having a piece of you in him and wanting to kill you and you having to actually let yourself die in order to save the world because you’re Jesus. It’s just not the same.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s not the same like, you know, the New Testament doesn’t really go into like what was going on with Mark at home, you know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But he was there. He was watching in the story that we cared about.

**John:** And therefore, we can only see Mark’s home story as it relates to Harry and so that’s why we’re not going to go home with Ron unless Harry is there.

**Craig:** And it’s why Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is so much fun because you can say, “Well, what if that was all of the emotional space?” You know. And I love stories like that where you just go sideways and you go, “Well, what if this was the story?”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And it’s funny, it’s actually something I’m trying to do right now on another thing and I love that but you have to understand if you’ve written a novel where three people have their own beautifully articulated emotional spaces, it’s going to be hard for an audience to actually split their attention that way. Our emotional tension is almost always focused on one person or one relationship.

**John:** Yup, I agree.

All right. Let’s talk through our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing, god, we’ve talked a lot about books today but mine is a book. It is Bartleby, the Scrivener which is a Herman Melville book which I read while I was in Austin. It’s super short, like you can read it in one sitting. It’s 99 cents on Kindle but totally worth reading. And the very basic plot summary is you have a lawyer on Wall Street who has scriveners who are people who are copyists, who make copies of contracts. And he hires this one guy who ultimately just refuses to work and yet the lawyer can’t quite fire him or can’t quite get him to leave his office. And that’s the entire plot of the story and yet it’s just delightful and delightfully well-written.

And the reason I heard about is because Slate did a thing where they took Bartleby, the Scrivener and they have the whole text, although I think it’s challenging to read the whole text in one long webpage. But they did essentially like a director’s commentary or like a filmmaker’s commentary on it. And so they have all these little footnotes and sidebars on the edge to talk through the different criticism and the different things that are actually happening in the story because it’s a short enough text that you can actually like really look at it from a bunch of different perspectives and sort of like what is this story even about because it’s deliberately ambiguous. And so, it was just a great example of trying to take something that doesn’t want to have a director’s commentary and put one on there so you can look at both the text and the surrounding information simultaneously. So I will link to both Bartleby, the Scrivener and the version of it that Andrew Kahn did for Slate where you can see all the notes about it.

**Craig:** I will check that out. What else could my One Cool Thing be but The Room Three.

**John:** So I did not even know this existed until I saw it here on the outline.

**Craig:** Very excited. So The Room was a One Cool Thing. The Room Two was a One Cool Thing. And now The Room Three is a One Cool Thing. For those of you who are not initiated, The Room series is a game for iOS or Android and it is essentially a mysterious occult themed puzzle game. The controls are just as simple as touching. There’s no moving around really and you are solving a series of beautifully rendered, creepy, awesome puzzles. You’re always in a room. You’re always interacting with some bizarre object that moves and opens and unfolds and transforms and it’s just beautiful. And they’ve done it again. And each one has been a little bit bigger than the one before it and they are so smart. I think it’s Fireproof is the name of the developer and they are so smart because they understand that you don’t need that much new. You just need to re-experience it and to get back into that vibe. It’s wonderful. Play it with your headphones on and volume way up. I love it. I mean, I got it on Wednesday, I’m already 60 percent of the way done and I’m bummed out because it’s going to be over soon. Yeah, but it’s great.

**John:** So pretty much anything with Room in it is recommended. So we love The Room the game. I loved Room the movie. Of course the other movie, The Room is a classic.

**Craig:** “You’re tearing me apart, Lisa.”

**John:** And Craig, the four of us need to do a locked room puzzle because we’ve never done one of those and I suspect you’re terrifically good at those.

**Craig:** Well, I’d like to think I’m really, really good at them but I’m okay at them. You know, I’ve done now three and I’ve gotten out of one out of them. So I usually go with Megan Amram who everybody should be familiar with. She wrote on Parks and Rec. She now writes on Silicon Valley and she also has a book out about science, Science… For Her! I think is sort of a parody —

**John:** I have the book.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s great. She is amazing. And David Kwong, my favorite magician, and Chris Miller of Lord and Miller. So we go with a bunch people, Melisa goes, and they’re great. They’re so much fun but, you know, they’re hard.

**John:** They’re hard.

**Craig:** They’re hard. We did get out of one of them in almost record time. I felt good about that.

**John:** Very nice. And that concludes our episode of Scriptnotes. So if you would like to subscribe to Scriptnotes, please go over to iTunes and click subscribe and while you’re there leave a comment. It helps other people find our show which is lovely. Show notes for this episode and all episodes are at johnaugust.com/podcast or /scriptnotes, that’ll work fine. Scriptnotes.net is where you go for all those back episodes, all the way back to episode one plus bonus episodes like the live Three Page Challenge we did in Austin and the Drew Goddard episode. If you would like to send us a note, Twitter is the best place for short messages, I am @johnaugust, Craig is @clmazin. For longer messages, write into ask@johnaugust.com. Our outro this week is by Matthew Chilelli who also edited the show. Thank you, Matthew. Our show is produced, as always, by Stuart Friedel. And that is it. Craig, thank you again.

**Craig:** Thanks, John.

Links:

* [The Austin Film Festival](https://www.austinfilmfestival.com/)
* Sign up for a premium subscription at [scriptnotes.net](http://scriptnotes.net/) for access to bonus episodes, like this week’s [2015 Austin Three Page Challenge](http://scriptnotes.net/three-page-challenge-austin-2015) and [John’s interview with Drew Goddard](http://scriptnotes.net/drew-goddard-the-origin-story)
* Man Up on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_Up_(film)) and [Apple Trailers](http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/independent/manup/), and writer Tess Morris on [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2208729/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/TheTessMorris)
* [2015 Nicholl Screenwriting Awards: Andrew Friedhof](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flcUaT0QhLk&feature=youtu.be) on YouTube
* Follow John’s progress on [his NaNoWriMo profile](http://nanowrimo.org/participants/john-august/novels/the-forest-909268/stats)
* Los Angeles Times on [Melissa Mathison](http://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-melissa-mathinson-dies-story.html)
* [Against Subtlety](http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2015/11/against_subtlety_the_case_for_heavy_handedness_in_art.html) from Slate
* Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener [on Project Gutenberg](http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11231), and the [interactive, annotated version from Slate](http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2015/10/herman_melville_s_bartleby_the_scrivener_an_interactive_annotated_text.html)
* [The Room Three](http://www.fireproofgames.com/games/the-room-three-2) from Fireproof Games
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/pg13-blood-boobs-and-bullcrap).

**John August:** So, hey, this is John. Today’s podcast, we’re going to be talking about the PG-13 rating and kind of necessarily we’ll be using some bad words. So if you’re listening to this podcast in your car with kids, here is just a warning about some bad language coming your way.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is episode 215 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast, we’ll be talking about the PG-13 rating, why it exists, and what it means for screenwriters. We’ll be talking about healthy and unhealthy relationships between writers and their representatives. And we’ll be answering some listener questions about what to do on an L.A. visit and using real stuff in your movies. So a big show today.

**Craig:** It is a big show. And I have to say that now that you — well, now that we have made it to episode 215, now it’s impressive. Every time you say it, I think, “Wow.”

**John:** A lot of episodes.

**Craig:** We have a body of work.

**John:** This past week we were on Franklin Leonard’s podcast and we talked about the show and things that are interesting to screenwriters. And it was weird being on someone else’s show with you talking about the show because it felt just like an extra episode that I didn’t have control of.

**Craig:** [laughs] Well, we’re starting to learn about you and your issues.

**John:** Hmm.

**Craig:** For me, it was exactly the same.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Show up and talk.

**John:** Actually, it was exactly the same because you did show up late and talked.

**Craig:** I know. It’s getting bad. Well, today, as people saw on Twitter, I thought I was 10 minutes late and in fact I was 1 hour and 50 minutes early.

**John:** Yeah. So maybe that’s good. Maybe that should be the plan is I’ll always pretend that the time of recording is a different time than it actually is. For people who just listen to the podcast and don’t look at us on social media, last Friday, I did post a long series of text messages between me and Craig from the very start of the show up until last week about Craig is running five minutes behind. So that’s up there for everyone to see. There’ll be a link in the show notes for that.

**Craig:** I mean, in my defense —

**John:** In your defense.

**Craig:** Those texts are over years.

**John:** Mm-hmm, true.

**Craig:** And, you know, obviously I don’t text when I’m on time.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs] So that’s my defense.

**John:** That is an absolutely fair defense. And it’s worth waiting for you, Craig.

**Craig:** Aww.

**John:** Aww. As I was putting together that series of text messages, I had to trim some stuff out that was just like not germane to it. But I regret, there’s a text message, I texted a photo of me and Malcolm watching Fantastic Negrito while you were off playing D&D with the rest of our friends. And I regret taking that out of the feed because it was just a nice moment of just me and Malcolm.

**Craig:** You know, I remember that and I still haven’t seen Fantastic Negrito live. But I do feel like I am responsible for his success.

**John:** Clearly, because you mentioned him on the podcast and talked about him for a few minutes. That’s really how a person becomes successful.

**Craig:** Well, that plus just a general mental exertion. In my mind, I’ve been willing him to be successful.

**John:** That’s good. Well, you’ve dis-secreted him into his success.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Most people, in order to implement the secret, they have to believe in themselves. But actually, just Craig believing in you is enough for it to come to be.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s not even a secret.

**John:** No. The Secret is no secret anymore.

**Craig:** Yeah, my book is called the fact.

**John:** [laughs] So the other thing which is a complete fact is that our Scriptnotes T-shirts are available only for one — not even one more week. If you’re hearing this podcast on Tuesday, you have exactly two days left to buy these shirts and then you will not be able to buy the shirts. So you probably want to get on this.

So go to store.johnaugust.com. You’ll see that there are three designs for the T-shirt. There’s the classic Scriptnotes logo in purple. There is the Three-Act Structure shirt by Taino Soba in blue. Both of those have been very popular. And this year we have two different colors of the Camp Scriptnotes shirt, which is a brand new design. There’s Craig’s shirt which is blue. It’s a navy blue.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And there’s my shirt which is green. And this really hearkens back to the first batch of Scriptnotes shirts which we had two colors. There was umbrage orange for Craig and there was rational blue for me. And we’ll see. Right now we’re neck and neck, Craig.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** And I’m really curious who’s going to pull ahead.

**Craig:** You know —

**John:** Do you want to pitch anything to your navy fans, your blue cabin buddies?

**Craig:** Well, I just want to say, you would look really sexy in that blue shirt.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** You know, Sexy Craig loves blue. Ah, so sexy.

**John:** That’s a strong argument for or against the blue shirt.

**Craig:** [laughs] I think it’s both really.

**John:** It really is. So depending on what your reaction is to Sexy Craig imploring you to buy the blue shirt, you might —

**Craig:** Oh, come on.

**John:** Choose to buy the blue shirt or the green shirt. But whatever you do, the nice shirts are $19 each. We are posing the order into the printers on Friday. So that literally is your last chance on Thursday to order one of these shirts. We will be printing them. We will be folding them up on the very table on which we record our live sit-around-the-table episodes of Scriptnotes and sending them out to your homes so you’ll have them for the Austin Film Festival.

**Craig:** Yeah. We’re going to be in your house.

**John:** Yeah. So maybe as we’re looking out at the crowd in Austin we’ll see how many blue shirts and how many green shirts there are.

**Craig:** You know, Sexy Craig has been away for a while.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** [laughs] I feel like he should be back more.

**John:** Yeah, maybe he can have his own spin-off podcast.

**Craig:** Yeah. He should.

**John:** He could do that on Earwolf.

**Craig:** Well, you know, I feel like Sexy Craig and Dan Savage could probably do a great podcast together just about sex, you know —

**John:** Mm-hmm, yeah.

**Craig:** And advising people.

**John:** Yeah, being sexy.

**Craig:** Just being so sexy.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Ah.

**John:** We have some follow-up to get to. First off, couple of episodes ago, we talked about misleading reviewer quotes, that thing where you sort of excerpt certain words out of a review to make it sound much better than it really was.

**Craig:** I love this so much.

**John:** So talk us through this one example here.

**Craig:** Well, so there’s a review here for a film called Legend. I think it’s about The Krays, the British mobsters, stars Tom Hardy. And so they put up a very typical review-oriented ad where they just listed four stars, four stars, four stars, four stars. And underneath the four stars, who gave it the four-star review. And then in the space between their heads, they have what you would think would be yet another four-star review and the person who said it which was I think it was The Guardian.

**John:** It was The Guardian, yeah.

**Craig:** Benjamin Lee from The Guardian. But in fact, [laughs] because it was situated between their two heads, it wasn’t that their heads were obscuring the other two stars of the four stars, he actually just gave it a two-star review. [laughs]

**John:** I think it’s just —

**Craig:** So great.

**John:** I think it’s just remarkable because it’s such a different way of doing a careful excerpting. And a good graphic design can hide many flaws.

**Craig:** I loved it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, I loved it. And I actually think that everyone should do this. It’s so brilliant. And it again boils down ultimately the only value that reviews have for studios is to flack their movies. And so, yeah, I mean, hats off. Whoever did that should get a promotion.

**John:** I agree. And I was going to say like slow golf clap but now I’m questioning whether — do you think that is worthy of a slow clap or do you think it’s a negative thing to say a slow clap? I think a sort of an appreciative like slow clap like well done, well done. But there’s also you can slow clap in a negative way. How do you perceive slow clap?

**Craig:** Both. I think slow clap is flexible. And in this case, I would give it the honest non-ironic slow clap.

**John:** I think it’s a slow clap with a nod is really what the differentiation is.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Yup. In a previous episode we talked about Apple Watch. And I complained/bragged that I didn’t think the Apple Watch was doing a great job tracking my exercise because I have an incredibly slow heartbeat.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Or my heart rate is low.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And I think you had said a similar kind of thing. And a listener sent us a post about, I think it was a Swedish study, that low heart rate is linked very strongly to criminality. And so people with low heart rates are much more likely to be criminals.

**Craig:** Well, I guess that makes sense because they’re generally calmer in situations that would make everybody else nervous. So I guess we could say they’re just dead inside. So they need crime. They need crime to get their heartbeat up a little bit.

**John:** That’s what one of theories is is that maybe it takes a much larger amount of activity to get them excited. And so therefore they are pushed to criminality. But I think it’s one of those interesting/troubling kind of findings because it strikes back to like what is it called? Phrenology, where they start to feel the bumps in your head.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s like, well, that’s a thing you can’t control at all. Then what? Are you just like going to lock up people with low heart rates or you’re going to give them drugs so their hearts beat faster?

**Craig:** Well, no. I think that you would just kill them early.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** The idea is you would screen everyone I think at the age of three.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That seems reasonable. And if your heart rate is below a certain number, you’re exterminated.

**John:** That’s true. And of course very easy to overlook in this study is that the odds of any of these people being criminals at all was really, really low. Period.

**Craig:** Right, right.

**John:** So it’s one of those things where, you know, people freak out because like, oh, this raises your risk of something 1% but it raises it from like it’s never ever going to happen to it’s never ever probably going to happen.

**Craig:** Yeah. This was essentially a valueless study and a bad headline.

**John:** [laughs] Yes. But even in those sort of bad headline stories, sometimes there is something interesting to study about why that correlation exists. It doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s anything you can do about it. But it’s a correlation.

**Craig:** I think I’ve already suggested what we can do about it.

**John:** Is to kill all the slow heartbeat people.

**Craig:** At the age of three.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** When they’re at their cutest.

**John:** But those people might not grow up to be professional athletes, which leads us to our final bit of follow-up.

**Craig:** Segue man.

**John:** Segue man. I’ve said on the podcast several times something like you are much more likely to be a professional basketball player than to be a professional screenwriter. And that my perception was that there are actually more professional athletes than there are professional screenwriters. That was an unverified, un-really-thought-through statement.

But someone tweeted at you and I this graphic that’s been circulated around which was apparently from — it has NFL logos on it, so it really is from the NFL, the National Football League, so not basketball but football, talking about what your odds are of making it in the NFL.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s a really cool graphic. We’ll have a link to it in the show notes. But, Craig, talk us through some of these numbers.

**Craig:** Well, they start by looking at high school football players, which according to them, you’re looking at around a million. And this is I think per year, essentially. So you have a million high school football players in a year, and that’s a million kids with at least one parent who thinks, “Oh, this is it. You’re going to make it.” But narrow it down a little further, let’s just presume we’re talking about seniors since they’re probably the most developed. That’s still 310,000 seniors.

**John:** Yeah. It’s a lot of kids.

**Craig:** It’s a lot. Of those kids, 70,000 will play NCAA football, college football. Still an enormous amount, 70,000. 20,000 of you will only play as a freshman. That’s what FR means, okay. Overall, 6.5% of high school players will play in the NCAA. So right off the bat, only 6.5% of those kids will even play college football.

**John:** So really 1 in 20 almost.

**Craig:** Right. Eventually, you get down to this number. The amount of players scouted by the NFL, 6,500. So out of the 70,000 NCAA football players in college, which again was culled out of the 310,000 high school football seniors alone and the million kids playing in high school football, 6,500 get scouted by the NFL. 350 are invited to the combine which is essentially the tryouts. You know, John, it’s like auditions. It’s like Broadway auditions.

**John:** It is. American Idol.

**Craig:** Exactly, but on a field where you’re hitting things.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Of those 350, 256 are drafted by the NFL. 300 rookies actually make a team. Percentage of players from the NCAA to the NFL is 1.6%. So to recap, 1.6% of 6.5% of 1 —

**John:** Million.

**Craig:** Million make it to the NFL.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s very tiny. And then, how many of them actually last? How many NFL players actually play more than three seasons? 150. This would be of that year’s class.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Very few. But I will say that I still think the odds are worse for screenwriting.

**John:** Look at these numbers. It does strike me that the number of actual professional football players is smaller than I was kind of guessing. So if you look at how this narrows down, it really does narrow down quite dramatically.

Compare that to WGA numbers. In 2014, there were 4,899 writers reporting earnings, which is basically writers who were working in some capacity. And of those, 1,556 were writing in features.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So if you have NFL players making your four — we have a number for 150. We don’t have the total number of football players who are playing in the NFL. But it’s not going to be 1,500.

**Craig:** No. It won’t be. So on that metric, yes, easier to be a screenwriter than to play professional football. But the metric that interests me is how long you play because I think from what I understand, at least from the WGA, is at any given point, a very large percentage of worked are people that will work once. Maybe twice, and that’s it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So to have a career as a feature screenwriter, I bet there are fewer people in the WGA who have, let’s say, we’ll call it five years of earnings as a feature film writer than there are NFL players who have played regularly.

**John:** Yeah. So I’m going back to sort of my sort of off-the-cuff analogy of professional football players or professional basketball players to working screenwriters. The jobs are so different. And I think one of the reasons why it’s such a strange comparison is that it becomes very clear who can be a professional football player versus who can be a professional screenwriter. So there is almost nobody playing professional football, I would say, who wasn’t a high school football player and a college football player.

**Craig:** There isn’t.

**John:** And screenwriters, it’s not the same thing. You can’t say like, “Well, that kid from high school who wanted to be a screenwriter is now a working screenwriter.” There’s not the hierarchy process at all for becoming a screenwriter. Like literally, someone could have written their first screenplay when they were 40 and now they’re working as a screenwriter. So that’s a very different thing.

Also, the NFL, your career is short because of there’s always new people coming up but also because you get injured. And you don’t get injured in the same way as a screenwriter. You may stop working, you may sort of lose heat and nobody wants to hire you to write stuff, but it’s not the same kind of thing.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah, there is a built-in limitation on that which we don’t have. I mean, even if you stay healthy, you will age out of the NFL. You know, as you get older, you lose athletic ability. That’s just life.

But there is something on the flipside of that that is tricky for people that want to be screenwriters. And that is you can. You know, anyone can, theoretically, be a screenwriter. If you are 5’10” and 170 pounds, unless you are a brilliant kicker or super duper fast, you’re not going to be in the NFL.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And so you inherently can’t. But anyone can. So that’s the lottery mentality of screenwriting that you don’t see when you look at the NFL because it’s not a lottery. I mean, there’s an enormous amount of genetics and hard work and talent that should have been tracked along the way.

**John:** I guess it’s one of the reasons why if someone doesn’t succeed as a screenwriter, they might feel like a failure. But if someone doesn’t succeed as a professional football player, well like, “Well, no, you didn’t.” But no one’s going to say like, “Oh, I can’t believe you didn’t make it as a football player.” It’s like, “Well, of course you didn’t make it as a football player.”

Like it seems so remarkable that anybody would make it as football player. Like you can just sort of look at the person, it’s like, “Well, no, obviously you’re not going to make it as a football player.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Versus a screenwriter, you can just keep slogging and slogging and slogging. Also, the only way you’re playing professional football in the U.S., basically, is to play for the NFL. Versus as a screenwriter, you can be doing your screenwriting thing and be still trying to make it as a professional screenwriter for a very long time on the edges. And that is a thing that doesn’t exist in football either.

**Craig:** Right. And so the opportunities are paired with the traps. I know a few guys who played Minor League Baseball and I know a couple of guys who played Major League Baseball. And, you know, the Minor League guys are, yeah, I mean they wished they had made it to the majors. But they’re awesome. I mean, they were in the Minor Leagues of baseball. I mean they were really, really good. They just weren’t good enough for that final level.

There’s no such thing like that in screenwriting. It’s not like there’s anyone out there where people are like, “Man, you are really good. I mean, you’re not great enough but, boy, you’re good. I mean, you’re really good.” It just doesn’t work that way.

So the opportunity is there but then there are the traps of, “Well, I just got to write one more script,” or “Well, I just got to try a little harder,” or “Well, you know, my time is coming.” And you can chase the lottery your whole life.

**John:** Well, I think what you’re pointing to is that good versus great is in professional athletics, there are clear metrics. You can tell how good a player is by, you know, whatever the metrics are of that sport. So I mean, how many runs, how many whatever, how many hits. You cannot track those metrics for a screenwriter. You can track how many things they sold, how many things they set up. But that’s not telling you how good of a screenwriter they are.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** There’s no objective measure about how good your writing is versus another writer versus, quite famously in professional sports, you can really track that and sort of predict how good a team will be based on the players that are on that team.

**Craig:** And so, again, no one can tell you that you don’t have what it takes to make it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** No one will stop you from trying. Well, I mean, they can try but they can’t make a great argument. I mean, I can’t say, “Look, you want to be a pitcher but your fastball is 78 miles an hour. It’s never going to happen.” I can’t say that to anybody as a screenwriter.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So there’s nothing to stop you. And you just have to be aware of that because unlike these other things where they will stop you, no one can stop you. And so, good, but also, beware.

**John:** I remember talking with a writer after one of our live shows. It was at the WGA. And I can picture his face but I don’t remember sort of all of the details. But he said, “I just wanted to thank you because listening to your show gave me the permission to let myself stop trying to be a screenwriter.”

**Craig:** I remember that guy.

**John:** And I thought that was actually such a brilliant, smart thing. And this is a guy in his 30s, I would say. And that is a sort of brave and wise thing to sort of come to is the realization that there’s an opportunity cost to pursuing one dream, and that is the exclusion of other dreams. And that if you are monomaniacal about this one thing and that one thing isn’t working, you have to also be aware of the things you’re not trying to do because you’re pursuing this one goal.

**Craig:** Precisely. And there is a very interesting aspect, at least it’s interesting to me. A strange aspect to what I would call American dream culture where we are encouraged to imagine this wonderful and romantic and exciting, passionate, creative life for ourselves. And then if we just believe and try hard enough, we will achieve it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The problem aside from the inherent unrealistic nature of that kind of dreaming is that the thing that you’re dreaming about, you do not understand. What you’re dreaming about is only what you can understand, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to dream it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** When you get there, it will not be your dream. Your dream is not attainable because it’s dreamlike [laughs]. I don’t know how else to put it.

**John:** I think Miley Cyrus might put it best in one of her lyrics is like there’s always going to be another mountain.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And it has to be the climb. And that’s the thing that feels so cliché when you hear it in a song lyric but you find it to be very true is that you kind of think like, “Oh, I’ll reach this destination and then I’ll be happy.” And then you reach that destination and like, “Oh, wait, why am I not happy? This is what I always wanted.” It’s recognizing that you have to find satisfaction and fulfillment in the work itself and in the struggle because there’s not an actual, necessarily, an outcome, which ties in very well to my One Cool Thing at the end of the episode.

**Craig:** And I feel like my One Cool Thing has been brilliantly set up as well.

**John:** Well, we should get on to our next topic so we can get to our One Cool Things at the end.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** All right. So our first big topic today is the PG-13 rating. And it’s one of those things where once you start looking for something, it’s just sort of everywhere. And so this has been in my week a lot. So I finished this script and this script is intended to be a PG-13 script.

Originally, I thought that this was a pretty hard R. And I remember pitching it to a really good director and he said, “Oh, that sounds really cool. So we can do it PG-13?” I’m like, “Oh, no, no, it’s a hard R.” And I can see sort of the light dim in his eyes a bit. And then as I was driving back, I’m like, “Wait, why is it a hard R?” And I started thinking about like what are the things that absolutely would make it have to be a hard R. And by the time I reached home, I was like, “You know what, I can totally do this as a PG-13.” And so I believe I wrote this as a PG-13 now.

So I want to talk through what those characteristics are of a PG-13 movie.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** But the other thing which struck me this last week because we were watching Reds. And Reds is a great movie.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And it is rated PG. And I’m watching this movie, I’m like, “How is this rated PG?”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s rated PG because it’s from 1981.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And so, in this movie, there are multiple fucks, there’s actual fucking. There’s, you know, sex scenes that are sort of more explicit than you would sort of guess would be there. There’s a lot of stuff in this movie that would not pass PG now and would probably actually push it to R, like you would have a hard time getting a PG-13 on Reds right now.

**Craig:** Well, if there’s multiple fucks and fucking, you’ll be R.

**John:** You’ll be R.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so I want to talk through sort of what that is and sort of what that means as you’re having a conversation about making movies in Hollywood today. So, some back story on the PG-13 rating. We’ll put up some links in the show notes.

But PG-13 rating comes from 1984. And there’s an article by Frank Pallotta that sort of talks through the genesis of it. But it’s basically Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in 1984 was the breaking point for the PG-13 rating. And you look at Temple of Doom and it’s a darker movie than the first movie is. There’s human sacrifices, a lot of blood. And there was enough outcry that the PG-13 rating came into being.

The text of PG-13 is “Parents strongly cautioned. Some material may be inappropriate for children under 13.” Again, it’s the MPAA, it’s the U.S. rating. Different countries are going to have different ratings around the world. And as we get into this, you’ll see that some movies that are rated one way in the U.S. are rated very differently overseas.

**Craig:** Right. And this was a rating that Spielberg himself pushed for because he felt that his kind of filmmaking wasn’t supposed to be R. It was meant for a wider audience but also it wasn’t quite as namby pamby as PG either.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I think that he was right. It’s a useful rating to an extent. What’s happened over time is that PG-13 has replaced PG.

**John:** Yeah. So few movies that I see these days are PG.

**Craig:** Right. I mean, the feeling is, “Well, if we’re not PG-13, why don’t we just be G?” Or, you know, people view PG as G, which is startling when you consider what PG used to be. Because you’re right, PG there was nudity. [laughs] It’s backwards from what you’d think. I mean, it seems like over time society becomes more permissive about these things. When it comes to movie ratings, it’s gone in the other direction. We are less permissive.

**John:** Clearly. We were talking about this at lunch in that there’s this overall perception that culture has gotten more liberal over time. But on everything about sex and language, it’s gotten much more conservative, especially when kids could experience it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And I’m not here to debate that. But I will tell you that as a person who’s trying to make movies, you are always having that conversation about what rating we think this is. And from very early on in the discussion of a movie, just like what I talked with the director about this movie, or when I talked about Scary Stories, that discussion of like, “Is this a hard PG-13?” The answer is yes, it has to be a hard PG-13 and not a soft R, because who wants a soft R?

**Craig:** Well, yeah. I remember early in my career I co-wrote a bad movie called Senseless. And it was never intended to be R. We wrote it to be PG-13 and they came back with R. And the problem was there was a bit where Marlon Wayans is making out with a girl. They are both clothed but he experiences an orgasm.

We don’t see nudity. We don’t see ejaculation. We just see him shutter and have an orgasm. And they said, “Yeah, that’s enough. R.” And for whatever reason, and again, just backwards, the studio was like, “Well, good. We want to be R.” I’m like, “No, we don’t. We really don’t because this is the softest R in history.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And it was. When you make a rated R comedy in particular, there’s an expectation that there’s going to be — you know, it’s going to get edgy.

**John:** Yeah. And so let’s talk about for international listeners, they may not really understand what the difference is in terms of practically like boots on the ground. A PG-13 movie, teenagers can go to it and they don’t need special permission. A rated R movie, theoretically, most places in the U.S., they will not sell you a ticket if you are a teenager unaccompanied. You cannot get into the theater. They may check IDs at the door.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Are they doing that all the time? No. But that is the expectation. And as a parent, I will tell you that my expectation of a PG-13 movie is like, “Yeah, my kid could probably see it. It would really depend on sort of like the nature of the movie.” But there’s no way I’m going to let my kid see a rated R movie —

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Unless I’ve seen it first.

**Craig:** Exactly. And interestingly, they will not check on PG-13. So that’s not a legal thing. That’s just a general signal to parents. But if a 10-year-old kid walks up to a movie theater by himself or herself and asks to buy a ticket to a PG-13 movie, they get it.

**John:** Meanwhile, I should caution people internationally who come to U.S. theaters. There’s nothing prohibiting a parent from bringing a baby into a rated R movie —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That will scream at a 10 o’clock show. So there’s nothing that stops parents from being terrible because of the rated R movie.

**Craig:** Nothing except my fists.

**John:** So let’s talk about what the things are that are involved in a PG-13 versus R decision. So it comes down to really three things. It is blood, boobs, and bullshit. And basically, it’s what we’re seeing in terms of violence, it’s what we’re seeing in terms of sex, and it’s what language we’re allowed to use in the movies.

So let’s start with blood. So I did a quick survey of some writer friends and director friends about what their experiences were with blood in movies because the last two things I wrote have some blood in it. I was concerned that like the amount of blood could just push us over the edge.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And what they came back to me was descriptions of the experiences they went through. And it seemed to me that if you have blood plus a verb, that is a potential problem. So if you see blood spattering, if you see blood oozing, that is more likely to trip you up than if blood is just an adjective.

So if something is bloody, not so bad. Something is bleeding, blood is flying out, that can be the problem, specifically if it’s human blood. Seems like the ratings board is much more forgiving of alien blood, violence happening to non-human creatures —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Not a problem.

**Craig:** Yeah. Of course there are times when we see movies and I think to myself, how did that get — I’m like, I know for a fact that I got jammed by the MPAA on something. And now I’m in the theater watching a PG-13 movie and they’re doing it. I’m like, “What magic did you guys use?”

I mean, for instance, I mean you’ve put this down in our summary to discuss. In Jurassic World, there’s that moment where the dinosaur eats someone off-screen and there is a splatter of blood all over the frame. And I think maybe they got away with it because the blood comes from off-screen, so you don’t see that it’s generated. But we know what’s happening. My daughter was terrified. She knows where that came from and it’s a big shower of blood.

I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s, you know —

**John:** Yeah. But they go back multiple times and they’re —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And one of the things that was a common refrain is that just like language, which we’ll get to, if you think there’s going to be a problem, you put in too much at the start so you can cut something out. And so you can go back to the rating board multiple times and you can show that you’ve cut stuff out and eventually sometimes you can win those arguments.

You’ll also make really strange logical arguments about, “Well, this superhero character is not actually human.” So the violence that you’re doing to him is not the same as violence to a human, because they seem to be very fixated on human to human violence. So even just in a fist fight, they don’t want more than a certain amount of blood. And they’ll be very deliberate about sound design or the feeling of fleshiness, the feeling that a body is being penetrated is a real issue and problem.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s not a problem for Sexy Craig. I will tell you, one of the strangest blood rulings that ever came down was for Kill Bill.

**John:** Tell me.

**Craig:** It’s that sequence where Uma Thurman fights off the Crazy 88, I think they’re called, this enormous gang. So Lucy Liu’s gang.

**John:** So it’s the sequence that’s inside the pagoda, sort of the indoor sequence —

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Not the one that was outside in the snow.

**Craig:** Right. So the indoor sequence where she essentially slaughters everyone. And it goes on and on and on. And there’s dismemberments and a ton of blood. And when they went to the ratings board, they came back and said, “It’s NC-17. There’s just too much blood. There’s so much blood and there’s so much spurting and splashing that it’s even beyond R.”

So rather than cut the sequence down, that’s when — I believe I’m correct about this — that’s when Tarantino decided, okay, I’ll have a moment where we’re kind of inside Uma’s mind and she blinks and the whole scene turns into black and white.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** And in the black and white, the blood is not red anymore, it’s just wet. And then later she comes back and then it’s okay. And they bought it. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Which is insane to me. But I actually think it made it a really cool sequence, so.

**John:** Yeah. Several directors said that it’s the redness of blood that can be the problem. So if you desaturate it, you can get away with more than you could otherwise.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So it seems crazy but it’s true. So another friend recommended this really great side by side comparison of The Possession, which is a movie about a —

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** A terrible Jewish box and — [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs] Just like my mother.

**John:** Aha. This movie was released as PG-13 in the U.S. and it was cut down in the U.S. in order to hit that PG-13. But in the U.K., it was released just in the original cut. And so you can see what they actually did to trim to get to the PG-13. And it’s really interesting.

And so, there’s less blood spattering. They hold on blood not as long. So there’s a moment in the U.S. version where some blood drips on his shoe but you don’t see where the blood is coming from in the U.S. version. There’s just a little less violence and it feels like they also scale back on some of the sound design so that less bad things were happening to a person’s body.

**Craig:** Yeah. And there was one moment where they didn’t include a particularly graphic injury. You know, so in one version, you see a woman smash into a table from behind. You’re behind her. She smashes head first into a table and flops backwards. In the U.K. version, you’re looking up through the glass as her head makes impact.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I got that. I understood, you know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That made sense.

**John:** That’s violence. But let’s talk about boobs and let’s talk about sex. And so my —

**Craig:** [sighs].

**John:** Oh, Sexy Craig’s favorite topic.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** My perception, and I don’t know this is actually true but this is sort of like screenwriter allure is that you’re allowed to show boobs once as long as they’re in a non-sexual context. So classic examples are Kate Winslet in Titanic.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so he’s sketching her and she’s topless but it’s okay because they’re not actually having sex at that moment.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s essentially artistic. And similarly, if you had a scene where a mother was nursing a baby or there was a scene where a woman was getting a breast exam, I don’t think that would push you into R. But again, this is an area where PG used to be more permissive.

So in the movie Airplane, Airplane was PG. And that was 1980. And there’s that famous moment where a woman goes jiggling by topless in the plane. And that was clearly meant to be sexual, and it was for me. And you would never be able to get away with that now. And not even PG-13, much less PG.

**John:** Yeah. And in terms of the actual seeing sex on screen, you know, I was looking through the movies that I’ve done and I don’t have a lot of sex scenes in my films. And the ones that do have sex scenes are rated R anyway.

So the first Charlie’s Angels, Drew wakes up in Tom Green’s boat and so she’s like half-covered naked. There’s moments in the first movie where she’s dangling naked from the Chemosphere over Hollywood and falls and rolls down a hill naked. And we were able to do it, but it was very careful to sort of like not show nipple.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So you can get by with showing a lot of boob and a lot of butt, as long as you’re not seeing nipple and sort of no pubic hair. And as long as you can do that, we can get away with the sequence. And again, it was not a sexual sequence, it was a comedic sequence.

**Craig:** Nobody has pubic hair anymore anyway. It’s all gone.

**John:** It’s realism.

**Craig:** It’s used to cover the plains. It’s all gone.

**John:** [laughs] it’s all gone now.

**Craig:** All gone.

**John:** But I don’t have a lot of other experience with sex in PG-13 movies. And so the thing I wrote — one of the things I wrote has a sex scene and I was careful it in ways that like, yeah, I could see the (inaudible) you wouldn’t see more than you would see on TV.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And I hope that works. I hope it feels like, you know, I’m seeing the right amounts of sex to let us know that a sex scene happened, but that we’re not dwelling on it.

**Craig:** I have a pretty good amount experience with the MPAA and sexual innuendo because when we were doing the Scary Movies, Bob Weinstein just loves sex humor and would just demand it be jammed in. [laughs] And it wasn’t really our favorite thing. But we did it. And inevitably, I would say to him, “This is — here you go, Bob.” And he would say, “No, it’s too soft. This feels like it’s PG.” That’s what he would always say, it’s PG. And I would say, “No, that’s going to be R. I guarantee you, that’s going to R. And we need to be PG-13 per your — ” And he’s like, “No, it’s PG.”

And then we would send the movie [laughs] and the MPAA and come back and say, “You can’t do that. It’s R.”

**John:** And give me an example of what that would be.

**Craig:** So for instance, a bad joke where we’re doing a spoof of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village. And Regina Hall’s character, Brenda, is attracted to one of the villagers. And you cut to him, he’s standing. And we just see him waist up and he is moaning in ecstasy. And then we see her, she’s — essentially, we’re looking at her from behind. She’s waist level with him and she’s making a jerk off motion with her hands. And it clearly appears that she’s jerking him off. And then you reveal that she’s actually churning butter and he’s just so excited and the butter is delicious and it’s terrible joke.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well, I mean —

**John:** That was too much innuendo?

**Craig:** Oh my God, way too much. So we had to go back and forth and it literally came down to how many times does her hand move up and down. I mean it’s the dumbest. These conversations get so stupid —

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** And so, I don’t know, like when it’s how many thrusts, how many hand movements and —

**John:** Oh.

**Craig:** It’s so ridiculous. And because the point is the joke, it’s not about length. Either it’s offensive or inappropriate for a child or it’s not. I always thought it was. I would hate it. I would sit in these screenings and something like that would come on and I could just feel like 14-year-old girls squirming in disgust. [laughs] And I didn’t blame them. It just was — it felt creepy.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And, you know, but what could we do?

**John:** Yeah, that feels creepy. Test is actually a really useful one, is that, you know, especially when you are a parent or even if you’re not a parent and you just have to sit in an audience and watch something with some teenagers or kids and you’re like, “Oh, that feels really uncomfortable.” It happens, it’s a real thing.

I worked a little on the first Scooby Doo and so I saw an early cut of that. And I just loved it and then I saw it at the premiere and they had changed the word demon to monster in a bunch of places, and they’d done a lot of weird softening. And it was because they wanted a PG rating and they couldn’t — I think it was a combination. They wanted a PG rating and something about demons pushed them too hard. But it was also that parents felt — parents really didn’t like the word demon. And that they thought it was too scary. And so they went through and did a whole bunch of sort of careful softening. And I just thought it really hurt the movie.

**Craig:** I bet you that was a religious thing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, because there —

**John:** I bet it probably was.

**Craig:** There are a lot of Christians that believe in demons, which is, you know — I’m just going to out on the limb here and say that it’s — there are no demons [laughs]. I’m going to go out on a limb, guys. They don’t exist.

**John:** A thing that is probably most evident from a script stage is language. And language is one of the few things that you sort of can control as a screenwriter on the page. And so let’s talk about what the beliefs are of screenwriters as they’re approaching language in movies. My rule of thumb and I don’t know if this is true, but this is just what people say, is in a PG-13 movie, you’re allowed one fuck as long as it is in a non-sexual situation.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So fuck you, fuckin’ a, go fuck yourself, all lovely. Let’s fuck, no. That’s not acceptable.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Or I want to fuck you, that’s not acceptable.

**Craig:** That is correct. As far as I know, that is the rule. That was always what was cited back to us. We would get one fuck and that was it. And it couldn’t be in a sexual context. What’s that woman’s name? I think her name is Beth Hand or something like that. She’s the MPAA lady who comes back to you and says, “Yeah, you have one too many fucks and one too many hand motions, whatever.” And I believe that was the rule. And I haven’t seen that rule violated, actually, in any PG-13 movie since I heard of it.

**John:** As screenwriters, I think we have watched every movie and we sort of like listen for that one fuck and it’s like, “Oh, there it was.” And then you sort of — I was just watching Wolverine, Days of Future’s Past — is it that one? No, sorry, First Class. And they try to recruit Wolverine and his only line in the whole movie is, “Go fuck yourself,” and then they walk out. And go fuck yourself, I guess it sounds like it’s a sexual situation, but it wasn’t — he wasn’t talking like I really want to fuck you.

**Craig:** Yeah. No. Everybody knows what that is. I mean we would carefully — there would be debates when we were doing the parody movies, “Where do we use our fuck?” And we would have — so we’d have three or four spots where we would shoot alternates because we weren’t sure where we wanted — I mean, and it’s sad, but it’s true. [laughs] It’s like salt on food. You add the word fuck in and the laughs get bigger. It’s bizarre.

**John:** They do. So let’s talk about shit and how often we can use the word shit and — because I’ve not ever run into a problem where I had to cut them out.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But do you run into that problem in your movies?

**Craig:** No, I believe that you are essentially unlimited. The only limitation is probably just how many times could people say the word shit anyway.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, fuck, you can say constantly.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Shit, not so much. So you’re basically, if you use it, you can probably even say shit once in a PG.

**John:** Yeah, you can.

**Craig:** But for PG-13, you know, go for it.

**John:** Yeah. So we’re talking about movies and sort of the MPAA. But there’s also, of course, restrictions when you’re writing for television. And in many ways, those restrictions are stronger, at least, on broadcast television. And this weird sort of nebulous of cable television and sort of what you’re allowed to and what you’re not allowed to do on cable television. So the shit barrier has been broken in cable. And so most cable networks will let you say shit, throw it in as much as you want to do. And there’s a South Park episode where they go — they famously go way overboard with shits.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And do it. Watching Mr. Robot this season, which I really enjoyed thoroughly, I noticed they were saying fuck so often. And what they would do is they would say the F and then just like silence out the rest of the word. And so it was it — you see them on screen, so clearly, they were saying fuck but you just didn’t hear the “uck” of it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so I tweeted at the show’s creator, Sam Esmail, to say, “Hey, are you like breaking new ground there? Like I’ve not seen this on basic cable before.” He’s like, “No, I don’t think we’re breaking any new ground.” And a bunch of people jumped in to say that, “I guess on Breaking Bad, the approach was they would do it once per season. And in Mr. Robot, they’re doing it like seven times in an episode.”

**Craig:** Right It’s interesting. I seem to recall going around with the MPAA on a movie where we were going for PG-13 and we were trying to play that game of what if we bleep it. And they said, “No.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** “You don’t get to do that in a movie. It still counts.” I guess in television, it’s a bit different.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, I don’t know, the whole thing is so stupid. It’s like, who’s watching the show? And my feeling is, if you can put a rating on the show, then put the rating on the show because — especially now, if your kid’s at home and you have no parental controls on your television, they can watch whatever they want.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They can watch a rated R movie with a press of a button. So put the ratings on the television shows. They’ve done it. And then just let it go.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Let there be rated R TV.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And not do this dumb shit.

**John:** Yeah. So I will say in the U.S. at least, there tend to be different standards for 8 o’clock shows, 9 o’clock shows, and 10 o’clock shows on broadcast networks. Cable networks tend to be much more liberal and sort of increasingly liberal when you get up to the pay cable, the HBOs, the Showtimes, the Netflixes, anything goes. And so they’re incredibly permissive about sort of what you can do.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** If all this conversation is making you think of the documentary by Kirby Dick, This Film Is Not Yet Rated, you don’t have to tweet at us. We’ll have a link to that in the show notes as well. So that’s a full documentary that talks through the MPAA’s rating system and sort of the controversies about how it all works.

**Craig:** It’s so worth seeing, especially because the documentary itself was then subject to the MPAA’s bizarro rating system.

**John:** Yes, it becomes very, very meta.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right. Let’s go to our next topic. Craig, how do you have a good relationship with your representatives, your agent, your manager and how do you have a bad relationship? What are some signs you can look for whether your relationship is going well or poorly?

**Craig:** Well, first, let’s start by acknowledging that when we talk about our agents and our managers if you have a manager, it is a relationship. I think a lot of writers feel like there’s some special category called representative and that’s its own thing and then — but it’s not really like — it is, it’s a relationship. It’s a relationship between people. And there are things that you can do to make that relationship work better and there are definitely things you can do to make it work worse.

So let’s start with the good stuff. I think the first thing that’s important for writers to do is be realistic about what their representatives can actually accomplish. Agents and managers are not magicians. Basically, what they are are people that are leveraging what you provide them.

**John:** Exactly. So they can only work their magic or to the degree they have any magic in showing the work that you’ve provided and getting that out in the town and getting other people interested in what you’ve written for them. They can’t tell you what to write. They can’t tell you how to write your stuff better. They can only work with the material you’re giving them.

**Craig:** Correct. And ultimately, they can’t force people to like something. They’ll do their best. Let’s remember that they get paid when you get paid. But they can’t force anything. So you have to be realistic about what they can accomplish. They’re just people.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Secondly, I think it’s important for writers to set the agenda of how the relationship should work. I think everybody that gets into the entertainment business, on some level, is a child with issues looking for parental approval from the world, which you will never get.

Specifically, you will not get it from your representatives and yet I hear often times writers describing or talking about their relationship with their agent like that person was their mom or their dad. They’re not. And what the danger of that transference in saying that my agent is like my mommy or my daddy is that what you’re then saying to them is, “In this relationship, you set the agenda. I’ll be sitting here waiting. You tell me what to do.” Bad idea.

You need to be in charge of your career in that sense. I actually think agents and managers appreciate it when a writer can sit down and say, “This is who I am. This is what I write. This is what I want to write. This is what I want my career to be like. And this is what I’m willing to do. Now, you help me do that.”

**John:** What you’re describing, I find so often. I think part of it comes because a new writer comes into the business and is so excited to have anybody taking them seriously, whatsoever. And if that person has more experience, if that person is 10 years older, naturally you’re going to fall into those I’m the child, you’re the parent roles. That’s not usually helpful for anybody.

And I remember my relationship with my first agent was sort of that thing. We were friends, too, but it was more that he was the person who knew everything and I knew nothing. And while that was accurate, it wasn’t overall helpful. And so when I moved to my current agent, we were much more peers. We were rising together and we could very much understand what each of us wanted.

**Craig:** Exactly. And when you lay out what you want, you actually enable them to get you what you want. It’s hard for them to get you what you want when you haven’t told them, when you’re just waiting for them to describe it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They’ll start to lose faith in you, too. Everybody wants a strong client. They want missions. They want goals. They want just as we do. Like when we’re sitting with people and they give us notes, we don’t want, “Can you make it 5% funnier?” We want actionable items.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So give your representatives actionable items. And to that end, it’s important that you communicate purposely with them. We get a lot questions and I see a lot of questions. How often should I talk to my agent? Should I bother them every week or every day or every month? How about this? Bother them when you have something to bother them about.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So I don’t talk to my agents every day. Sometimes I go a month or two without talking to them. But when I talk to them, there’s an agenda and there’s a purpose. And that I think is very helpful because I’m not grinding the relationship with my insecure need to chitchat or gossip. We have a professional relationship. And I find that helpful because when I do talk to them, everybody takes it seriously.

**John:** Absolutely. I talk to my agent much more often than that. But, you know, there’s times where like weeks will go by. It’s because I’m busy writing something. And there’s really nothing to actually talk about. There’s no business to get done. And so those day where I’m talking to them five times, it’s because there’s something really pressing and decisions have to be made right away. And so I think, communicate purposely.

And also, get back to them quickly. So if they’re looking for you to read something or to respond to something, do it promptly. Because you’re expecting them to respond promptly, you have to respond promptly as well.

**Craig:** 100%. And similar to the get back to them promptly is listen to them. And this is something that I think a lot of writers say they do but don’t actually do. Our agents are constantly trying to tell us things. But because of their training and I think just the personality that goes along with agenting, they sometimes struggle to relay bad news or negative information. Listen carefully to what they’re saying. You can be skeptical about what they’re saying, but you can’t be a denialist.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because sometimes there’s bad news.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And you have to listen to it and you have to be — you have to show a willingness to hear it and absorb it because there’s no way to move forward or get better or improve things if you’re denying what they’re saying.

**John:** And sometimes it means asking the tough follow-up question. So the kinds of bad news that you’re going to get from your agent is, yeah, they didn’t think the meeting went well, they’re going with another writer, they’re not going to take you for your optional step, you got passes from these places on your spec script.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** The question which is harder to ask, but which is sort of needed to ask is, is there any feedback? Is there any sense of sort of what happened there? And sometimes they’ll have the answer, sometimes they won’t have the answer. Sometimes it’s a thing you can fix or change, sometimes it’s not. But by asking that question, you might find out like, you know what, they really just liked this other writer better. And like that’s going to happen. Or they just didn’t sort of believe in the draft. That’s going to happen too. And I’ve had to ask sometimes the tough questions like, was it me? Am I being unreasonable here? And sometimes I’ve heard like, “Yes, you are being unreasonable.” I remember Aline talking about her agent who said like, “Shut up and write the next draft.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And sometimes you need the agent who can tell you that and you’re only going to get that relationship by asking those questions that could have negative answers.

**Craig:** Yes. Sometimes I find myself talking to a writer who is wondering out loud about something. And like, “It’s been a while. I’m trying to get work. It’s been a bit of a struggle. I’m wondering if maybe like somehow I’m on the outs.” And I just want to say, “If only there were someone you could ask. Pick up the phone, call your agent and say, ‘I am giving you permission to speak as frankly and honestly as possible, where do I stand?'” Only then can you do something about it. So you have to listen.

What you shouldn’t do — let’s talk about ways to poison the well — where I think things can go wrong, is when writers start to lean on their representatives like they’re therapists.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Or they’re emotional dumping grounds. You’re the person, I call it, a cry — you know, I’m going to cry on the phone to you because I feel upset. Or I’m going to treat you like my parent. Or in the worse case, I’m going to be abusive to you and blame you for everything that’s going wrong. Or on the flip side, I’m going to count on you like my angel. So I don’t have to worry about taking control of things. My angel will come and save me if I just pray to them hard enough. That’s not what they do and you will be disappointed.

**John:** It’s so tempting to vent to your agent because people are annoying and frustrating. But that person who you had a terrible meeting with could honestly be one of their good friends. And so you have to sort of, you know, be honest but measured in your criticisms with people and just not sort of slam a lot of doors.

**Craig:** Agree. You should not be passive. Don’t think of your agent as person who gets me a job. They actually aren’t people who get you jobs. They’re people who negotiate employment for you. You get you a job. Yes, they can help put you in rooms. Yes, they can help get you opportunities to get a job, but you are going to end up with a bad relationship if you view your roll in the partnership as entirely passive. It’s not.

**John:** It’s not at all. So you’re responsible for landing the job. They can sort of get you — they can put you on the runway, but you have to like fly the plane.

**Craig:** Precisely. Another mistake that, I think, people make in their relationships with their agents is being naïve about the nature of the agency business itself. So what will happen is someone will say, “I’m going to fire my agent. I hate them. I really wanted this job. And they knew I wanted this job. And then their other client got the job. And how can he do this to me. And it’s not fair, nanananananana.”

And I just want to say, did you not know? Oh, were you at the Just You agency? Did you not know that were other clients there that could also do what you do, that would also want what you want? Did you not think that they also had this conversation? Get used to conflict of interest. It’s inevitable. You can’t get around it, so don’t hold that against the agency.

**John:** You know what, I’ve sort of been at one agency for a very long time. And I really sort of only dealt with sort of one person, and sort of one way, it all works. But there are some writers, and I think you may know who I’m talking about, who play this sort of strange meta game where they’re at one agency, but they actually know agents at other agencies and they’re talking to other agents. And the other agencies are working for them, too.

There’s ways you could sort of be very connected with more than just your fundamental agent and really have a good sense of the overall, how it’s all working. I’m not sure that’s helpful for most writers. But there are people who, in some smart ways, really understand how everything fits together. And they can end up getting those jobs or having better relationships with filmmakers and with other talent because they are, you know, they’re friendly to everybody and they’re not sort of focused only on this one relationship with this one agent.

**Craig:** Right. And you should know as a client that if you end up in a situation where you feel your agent somehow screws you over in favor of another client, fire them, get a new agent, but just know that the new agent will be in the exact same position.

**John:** Yeah, I have a friend who’s looking at replacing his agent. And it’s one of those weird situations where he has to decide, do I stay at the same — he’s at a big agency. Do I stay at the same agency and go to a different team or do I leave the agency? And I don’t understand how it can possibly work that you stay at the same agency with different agents. I feel like, especially today, everything is so connected and you’re going to end up dealing with those other agents no matter what. And so just like you kind of fired them but you’re still around.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It feels like a mess.

**Craig:** It does feel like a mess. And lastly, I would say to our writer friends that when you talk to your agents, it is a mistake to on the one hand simply assume that they’re right because they’re talking to you. And then on the other hand, get angry when they’re not right. The fact is they’re just people. I don’t listen to my agents and invest 100% faith in what they’re saying. I have a conversation with them the way I would with anybody else. There are things that they know that I don’t know and I can — I know the difference between fact and opinion. But we have a dialogue about the opinions.

And there are times where I have challenged them and I was right. There were times when I challenge them and then they were right. But we have the discussion. It’s important that you do have that discussion with them because you will then forgo the disappointing ‘you were wrong’ discussion. Yeah, that’s right, sometimes they’re wrong. Shocker.

**John:** I think you also have to remember like what are agents actually trying to do? Agents are trying to keep their clients employed because agents get paid — we’ve said this a thousand times — agents get paid when you get paid. So their goal is to keep their clients employed. Their goal is not to make the best movies in the world. Their goal is not to make everybody happy or make one studio incredibly rich. Their goal is to keep their clients working.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so look for their expertise in sort of what deals are happening right now, where things are getting set up, that kind of stuff. They will actually know a lot of information about that. Don’t look to them for great advice about like how this could be a better movie or what the nature is of — would this filmmaker be the right fit for you. Like that’s not going to be their expertise. Their expertise is in making deals, making connections, and hoping everything works out okay.

**Craig:** And even when you’re talking about their area of expertise, don’t be afraid to express your opinion. If they say, “Listen, we want to go in and ask for this.” It’s okay to say, “I actually want you to ask for this,” and then have the discussion. You can, eventually they may say, “You’re nuts and you just got to trust us on this.” And then you can. Just the way that it works in any discussion with people where they just finally look at you and go, “No, no, no, you just got to trust me on this.”

But there have been times where we’ve had those discussions and we came up with a new plan together.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You have input and this way you don’t feel like you just got jobbed somehow.

**John:** Yeah. You have to remember that you have a relationship with your agents and your managers, but you also have a relationship with studio executives and with producers and other people who are involved. And so sometimes, that triangle is sort of strange. And like, that producer will try to play you against your agents, or you’ll be trying to play the producer. And it’s a complicated thing especially as you’re trying to talk about money or how are we going to get this movie made? And recognize that different people have different agendas.

So invariably, as you’re trying to ask for a raise on a project, you’re going to get these weird phone calls saying like, “Oh, we can’t possibly do that. Business affairs is slamming us down.” And you’re going to have to make some calls yourself because your agent won’t be able to do it. Like there are going to be tough decisions that you yourself have to make and you can’t just expect your representatives to do it all for you.

**Craig:** No. But whatever those decisions are, you just have to know that you’re going to be making them in concert with your representatives.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** So they need to know. And that requires you having those grown up discussions with them.

**John:** Yeah. You went through this whole thing without talking about your fundamental, underlying advice which is to fire your agent.

**Craig:** Well, you know, because it’s not going to necessarily [laughs] help you to have a good relationship with your agent.

**John:** No, it’s not.

**Craig:** But yeah, don’t forget that this is not a marriage. It’s a work partnership. It’s a professional partnership. So in the back of your mind, just know I can end this.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That in and of itself helps you be a little more confident and a little more aggressive — and when I say, aggressive, I don’t mean angry aggressive, I mean active, a little more active in the relationship because I want it to work. I chose this person to partner with professionally. I’m not going to then now lean back and just let them do everything and complain about how they do it. I want to work with them.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So keep that in mind that if it’s not working, you fire them.

**John:** Yeah. I’m going to underline the point you made, that it’s not a marriage. And that so we talk about how important it is to have a relationship and we may talk about things that sort of sound like marriage terms and about open lines of communication and expressing clear agendas. But you are not as bound to this person as you think you are. And if things are not going well, both parties have the ability to walk away and it’s actually very simple and relatively unencumbered. You are going to be dealing with them on some projects that they may have set up. Sometimes, there are lawsuits about, you know, certain things and who set what stuff up. But most cases, you just walk over to another agency and stuff is fine.

**Craig:** Exactly, exactly.

**John:** Right.

**Craig:** You will live. You’ll survive.

**John:** We have run out of time in this episode for two of the things we want to talk about, which is about what you should do in L.A. if you are just in L.A. for a short time as a screenwriter, and how to use more real stuff in your movies. So we’ll save those for next week. But I think we have to get to our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** They’re so cool.

**John:** So my One Cool Things is an article by Tom Chivers writing for BuzzFeed where he asked — he sat down with a bunch of atheists. And he asked them how do they find meaning in a purposeless universe? And I thought it was a really great conversation with a bunch of smart people because I think the default assumption is that if you are an atheist, you’re going to have a view that nothing really matters. And so well, how do you find stuff that does matter if there’s no sort of end game to it?

And for screenwriters, I think it’s really interesting because we have this incentive, this instinct to narrativize everything. And so there has to be a final goal. Like your hero has to accomplish something because they’re going to achieve something at the end. And as we look at our lives, we have those little small milestones, but we want our overall life to have some sort of purpose like my being here on Earth was meaningful for this reason.

And there’s going to be this natural instinct to, well, I do this and then because I did this, there’s a reward at the end. And the reward at the end could be heaven if you’re a religious person. But if you’re not a religious person, how do you find rewards in the present day? And I thought it was a bunch of smart conversations about how you find meaning in the present day. And if you don’t perceive life as being a dress rehearsal for this next stage, what does your daily agenda look like?

**Craig:** It’s a fascinating topic and certainly close to my heart because I am an atheist and because I do believe that I live in a purposeless universe and yet I also derive great personal meaning from my life and I have values and I have morals and I believe that those things are all compatible. And I’ve never actually met someone who is an atheist who says, “You know what, I’m going to drive my car into a crowd of people today, because why not?”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It just doesn’t work that way. That’s not the way we are.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There’s another great talk by Sam Harris. I believe it was a TED talk and we’ll throw the link on, where he talks about science and how even if you eschew metaphysics entirely, that the pursuit of scientific truth in and of itself helps us live a good life and helps form the bedrock of certain moralities. It’s really, really well done. So if you’re of this sort of bent, take a listen.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** All right. Well, my One Cool Thing is a one cool person. And it’s an athlete so it ties in a little bit to our NFL discussion with the coolest name, Didi Gregorius.

**John:** That’s a great name.

**Craig:** Isn’t it great? So Didi Gregorius is the starting short stop for the New York Yankees. Why is he so cool? Well, for starters, he had just about the biggest shoes to fill ever. He was Derek Jeter’s replacement. Derek Jeter isn’t just a future first ballot hall of famer and former Yankee captain, but he’s an institution. He is just truly beloved, not only by the Yankees, but by all of baseball. And that’s a rare thing indeed. So you can’t get bigger shoes than that to fill.

And who did the Yankees turn to? Well, very odd guy in, at least statistically speaking. Didi Gregorius is a black man who’s Dutch. He was born in the Netherlands. He is, I think, one of two black Dutch men to play [laughs] Major League Baseball in history and maybe one of six or seven Dutch nationals to play ever. He speaks four languages. Born in Amsterdam, raised in Curaçao. And he’s young. He’s really young, he’s 25 years old. He’s never been an everyday player until this year. He gets paid $533,000 which is barely above the minimum. So the union minimum in Major League Baseball is $507,000. So he’s not even getting scale plus 10 on that, you know, in that sense.

So already, we have this very interesting character for our sports movie of a guy that has to fill in for legend. And he’s first month was a disaster. [laughs] He was terrible at the plate and even worse, he was terrible on the field. And that was really where everybody had kind of hoped he would shine because God love Derek Jeter, but as he went on in his career, his defensive skills did start to wane. And it was costing the Yankees some games.

Well, just like a sports movie and life doesn’t usually work like this, but in this case, it did. He turned it around. And he started to do amazing things in the field, truly amazing things. And he even started to hit the ball really well. And at this point in the year, so it’s his first year where he’s an every day starter, filling in for Derek Jeter, plus his name is Didi Gregorius which is the coolest name ever, plus he’s Dutch. He currently has the second highest WAR in the American League. And that means wins above replacement. It’s a fancy statistic that basically says, if we replace you with a scrub, how many games would we lose? [laughs] In other words, how many games do we win because you’re not a scrub?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And he is the second highest in the American League and fifth among all short stops. How cool is that? Didi Gregorius, awesome season. One cool guy.

**John:** What I love about your choice there is it plays on both of our instincts in that, you know, in baseball now, it does come down to so much the numbers. So you’re citing a number with this WAR figure and yet what is really appealing to you about him is not his numbers but about his sort of unique story —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And his unique character. And that’s honestly what we’re drawn to is we’re drawn to characters and we want to see the story even if the story may not necessarily always be reflected in the numbers.

**Craig:** Indeed, indeed.

**John:** And that is our show this week. So a final reminder. This is your last chance to get your t-shirt for Scriptnotes. And so if you want one, you should go to store.johnaugust.com. If you want to support the John side, you should buy a green camp t-shirt. But if you really need to have Sexy Craig’s blessing —

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, you want the blue shirt, don’t you, baby?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Was that like a shiver of disgust? [laughs]

**John:** It’s whatever you want to be, Craig. They’re only up there until Thursday. So if this is Tuesday, you’re listening to the show, you should chop, chop, get on it. Our outro this week is by — comes via Chris French. And so it’s actually a snippet from the Coming to America soundtrack which actually has the Scriptnotes theme in it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So some time traveler listened to the podcast, went back in time and wrote it into the theme for Coming to America.

Our show is produced by Stuart Friedel. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. If you have a question for me or for Craig, you can write those longer questions to ask@johnaugust.com. johnaugust.com is also where you can find the show notes with links to many of the things we talked about. If you’d like all the episodes back to the very start, you can go to scriptnotes.net, that’s where you sign up for membership for $1.99 a month. That gives you access to all the back catalogue and through the app that you can find on the app stores, you can listen to all those back episodes.

We’re on iTunes. So while you’re there, leave us a rating. Leave us a little comment because we love to read those little comments.

**Craig:** We do.

**John:** We’re on Facebook, but we almost never check the Facebook, but we — because I mentioned it this week, we’ll actually check the Facebook comments. But we do check Twitter a lot. So that’s where I make fun of Craig for being late.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig is @clmazin. I’m @johnaugust. And that is our show for this week.

**Craig:** Good show, John.

**John:** Good show. I’ll see you next week.

**Craig:** Next week, bye.

Links:

* [For two more days, Scriptnotes shirts are available for pre-order in the John August Store](http://store.johnaugust.com/)
* [Black List Table Reads, with John and Craig](http://blacklist.wolfpop.com/audio/39626/john-august-and-craig-mazin)
* [Craig is running a few minutes behind](http://johnaugust.com/2015/craig-is-running-a-few-minutes-behind)
* [Tom Hardy’s Legend snuck a 2-star Guardian review onto its poster, made it look like 5](http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/tom-hardys-legend-film-snuck-a-2star-review-onto-its-poster-made-it-look-like-5-10492505.html), from The Independent
* [The biology of crime: Low heart rate may predict criminal behavior, study says](http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-low-heart-rate-criminal-behavior-20150909-story.html), from the Los Angeles Times
* [The odds of making it in the NFL](http://imgur.com/gallery/zNOVaO6)
* [Addition of the PG-13 rating](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Association_of_America_film_rating_system#Addition_of_PG-13_rating) on Wikipedia
* [How ‘Indiana Jones’ Finally Forced Hollywood To Create The PG-13 Rating](http://www.businessinsider.com/indiana-jones-and-the-temple-of-doom-created-pg-13-rating-2014-4), from Business Insider
* [The Possession: PG-13 Vs. Uncut Edition Comparison](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1vwu2R6ox0) on YouTube
* [This Film Is Not Yet Rated](http://kirbydick.com/thisfilmisnotyetrated.html), and [on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Film_Is_Not_Yet_Rated)
* [I Asked Atheists How They Find Meaning In A Purposeless Universe](http://www.buzzfeed.com/tomchivers/when-i-was-a-child-i-spake-as-a-child#.em1Y5xnxG5), from BuzzFeed
* Sam Harris’s TED talk: [Science can answer moral questions](http://www.ted.com/talks/sam_harris_science_can_show_what_s_right?language=en)
* [Didi Gregorius making a name for himself with Yankees](http://espn.go.com/blog/new-york/yankees/post/_/id/88945/didi-gregorius-making-a-name-for-himself-with-yankees) on ESPN.com, and Didi on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/DidiG18), [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didi_Gregorius) and [baseball-reference.com](http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/g/gregodi01.shtml)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) from Coming to America, sent to us by Chris French ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/ndas-and-other-acronyms).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is episode 213 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

So, Craig, this last week I got to give a presentation, like a proper presentation with like Keynote slides and all that stuff. Have you done one of those recently?

**Craig:** With Keynote slides? No, because I’m not a sales rep for the southwestern medical appliance industry.

**John:** Yeah. I very rarely get to do those. And so whenever I have to crack open Keynote, it’s basically, you know, half an hour of reminding myself how Keynote works. And then I have a lot of fun with it. But it’s a ways to sort of get started in the whole designing of a proper presentation.

But I had a really fun time. And one of the slides I put up was about Clueless which is, of course, my favorite or my second favorite movie of all times. And in the Q&A afterwards, someone asked a question about Clueless. And it brought up an interesting point which I hadn’t thought of, is what if Cher in Clueless didn’t have voiceover? And how would you perceive that character if you didn’t have the ability to go inside of her head?

**Craig:** It is an interesting question. Some movies are just begging for it, you know. You need it. And we’ve talked about how musicals require you to sing what’s happening in somebody’s head. And it’s weird. It seems like the teen genre often feels like I need to know what’s going on in their heads because so much of what they’re saying and doing, the joke is, “This is not how I actually feel,” which is a very teenage kind of thing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So I think Mean Girls has a lot of VO, doesn’t it?

**John:** It does. It’s one of those things where I feel like in Clueless, she would seem like a sociopath if you didn’t actually have that inside, if you just like had all the shots of her walking around thinking, like, “Wait, what is she thinking? I don’t understand what’s going on inside of her head.” And that ability to have voiceover is like the ability to have a song. You get to know what is driving her at those moments.

And in a weird way, it allows her to keep many more simultaneous wants because you would not be able to keep track of what it was she was trying to do at the moment if you didn’t have that voiceover to sort of talk you through what was happening.

**Craig:** It’s an incredibly useful tool. It’s so flexible. I was actually talking the other day with a director. He’s currently in post-production on a movie he did. And I won’t say who it is or what the movie is because I don’t want any spoilers.

But the movie has a lot of VO kind of in the Goodfellas style. And he said, “I’m so tempted to never make a movie without VO again because in terms of editorial, it’s the most freeing thing ever.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You need to cut a scene because it’s not quite working but there’s that one piece of information there, we got VO [laughs]. It’s throughout the whole movie, not a problem.

**John:** Well, let’s try to distinguish that kind of Goodfellas VO from the Clueless VO. So the Goodfellas VO, I want to say it’s like the ellipses kind of, like basically it allows you to skip over a bunch of things because it is telling the overall narrative. Is that correct? Is that what you were trying to describe in a Goodfellas VO?

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, Goodfellas VO is more of a — one of the characters actually narrating the story as if they’ve already seen the movie —

**John:** That’s right.

**Craig:** Or they’re telling the story of their lives. In the case of Mean Girls or Clueless, a lot of times, the VO is an interrupter. It’s like a commentary. Like somebody who’s doing color commentary on their own life.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But the color commentary version allows you to also do the skip ahead stuff if you need to.

**John:** Yeah. I would say that the Clueless and Mean Girls VO is very much a present tense VO. It’s describing what’s going on inside as they’re experiencing the scene in front of them. And so they’re having revelations at the moment and you’re seeing the revelation on their face while you’re hearing the voiceover, versus the Goodfellas which is like it’s telling the story as if this has already happened and this is the through-flow of a narrative.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s a great way of thinking about it. It’s like in sports, there’s the person who’s commenting on the game as it’s happening. And then there’s the person who does the post-game wrap-up. And, yeah, Goodfellas is more of a post-game wrap-up and Clueless is more of the color commentary as the game is being played.

**John:** And our experience has been, and I’m sure that I speak for both of us, you have to plan for that in advance. And if you try to put that color commentary or that narrative commentary voiceover on after the fact, it will probably not work.

**Craig:** It won’t work because first of all, you need space. I mean, you need to be able to shoot in such a way. Like if you know that there’s going to be VO sort of sneaking in, you need to know that as you’re shooting.

**John:** Yeah. I have not shot any movies where it’s been so crucial. Like Big Fish has a lot of voiceover but in a weird way, there was always time to sort of get that voiceover in. But classically, you will have somebody read that stuff on the set just to make sure you’re allowing enough space. So be it the assistant director or somebody else will read what that voiceover is just to make sure that everyone understands what it is that’s going to fit in that space.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** In the case of Big Fish, rarely is the character responding to the kinds of things that are being said in the voiceover. But you still want to make sure you have enough handles on those shots to be able to get that voiceover in there.

**Craig:** Yeah, especially if the voiceover is part of a joke.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Then somebody really does need to read it because the person on screen needs to react or at least acknowledge with their eyes that this is what they’re thinking. So you do need to prepare. The post facto VO is usually a desperate rescue mission.

**John:** Yes. And that’s why it gets such a bad rap.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Yup. Today on the show, we are going to be talking about non-disclosure agreements which came up because this thing I had to give a presentation on, I had to sign an NDA, so I can’t talk about what I talked about. But we can talk about non-disclosure agreements.

We’re going to answer a bunch of listener questions, including questions about international writers, acronyms in dialogue, and what someone means when they say, “This would make a good writing sample.” Is that a good thing or a bad thing? So those are our new topics but we have so much follow-up.

First off and maybe most importantly, we finally have T-shirts.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** Yay. So there are four Scriptnotes T-shirts and they are available right now in store.johnaugust.com. They’re all preorders. And so when we say preorder, that means you will purchase a T-shirt and we will print the T-shirt and we will send it to you. But if you purchase the T-shirt today, it will still be three weeks before it gets to you.

So the four T-shirts that are available, first is a classic Scriptnotes T-shirt that has —

**Craig:** Classic.

**John:** The typewriter logo. And we had to find a new color we had never done before, so we picked vintage purple. Is that a fair description?

**Craig:** Okay. Is it? [laughs] I would call it purple.

**John:** Purple. Yeah, everything has to have some modifier to the actual color —

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** It’s the J.Crew rule where everything has to be a heather something.

**Craig:** I see. So this could be like a courgette purple.

**John:** Yeah, a courgette. I mean, an eggplant really is the other sort of good choice for it. But this is the classic typewriter. And so if you have the other collection of Scriptnotes T-shirts, there was a black one with a typewriter, there’s the tour shirt which has sort of a modified typewriter. There was the original orange and there was the blue T-shirt.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So this is the new hotness. Our second T-shirt is developed by one of our own listeners. Taino Soba came up with this design. It’s called Three-Act Structure and it is a blueprint of a script.

**Craig:** Yeah. I like it. It was very minimalist. It was clean. I like that it implied that you could assemble a screenplay like a piece of IKEA furniture.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** I have to say, having assembled quite a bit of IKEA furniture in my life, writing screenplays may be slightly easier.

**John:** Yes. It might be a little bit more straightforward. You have choices with a screenplay that you really don’t have with IKEA furniture. There are sites, and we’ll try to put a link to it, of like IKEA furniture assembled in ways that are not the way they’re supposed to be assembled. And sometimes they’re brilliant.

It’s sort of like the way you can take a cake mix and modify it in ways and it creates something fantastic. There’s ways you can do that with IKEA furniture.

**Craig:** You’ve built a lot of IKEA furniture, right?

**John:** Oh, so much in my life.

**Craig:** A question for you. Have you ever, in your life, successfully built a piece of IKEA furniture without making one mistake that required you to unscrew something?

**John:** Never once in my life.

**Craig:** No, no one has.

**John:** I’ve always had to backtrack a little bit.

**Craig:** Everyone has because their instructions are horrendous.

**John:** Yes. Well, their instructions are designed so that they don’t have to put a lot of words and therefore translate them a lot. But sometimes the pictures cannot actually accurately explain what’s going on.

The one piece of advice that I have for anybody who has to assemble IKEA furniture — actually, when we finish this podcast, we are going to be assembling a new IKEA table that we got as a work table for downstairs.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** Buy yourself, you know, a cordless drill or a cordless drill driver and get yourself the Allen wrench bit because that will make assembling IKEA furniture about 17 times as fast. If you don’t have to turn that little Allen wrench manually, your life will be so much better.

**Craig:** Let me go one step further.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** Not only should you have the power drill and a wide variety of bits, by the way, get yourself as many Phillips head, flatheads, hexes, all of them, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Torx. But also, they make an extender. So it’s like a long bit with another receiver at the end so that in those tight to reach spots, you’re not defeated.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So you get that thing and now you’re golden.

**John:** So is that extender, is it a hard thing or is it flexible?

**Craig:** No, no, it’s hard. It’s a hard piece of metal. So it’s got a male on one end and a female on the other. The male goes into your drill end. And it’s magnetized at the receiver end.

**John:** Oh, nice.

**Craig:** So the bit just slips in and it goes click. And now you can reach everything.

**John:** But I foresee there would be a benefit to the flexible version of that. So it’s kind of like a sigmoidoscopy. It can sort of sneak into those places which would be otherwise hard to reach, that otherwise you would have to use that stupid little Allen wrench tool to get in there.

**Craig:** John, I want you to think through what you’ve said there.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I want you to imagine [laughs] the flexible thing turning in the drill. And now tell me what’s wrong with this.

**John:** You’re saying that the whole thing would whip around and —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That they’re not —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But I bet someone solved this problem. There’s a way in which the —

**Craig:** What you’ve created is essentially an edge trimmer. There’s a piece of fishing line that’s —

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** That’s what you’ve done. Now, there are universal joint ends that can actually spin and turn in a hard right degree. You can get at a certain angle with the universal joint. But I’ve never seen one made and it would be structurally shaky at best because it wouldn’t really — universal joints are best when both ends are hard fixed to something.

I would love to see you build this —

**John:** I believe we —

**Craig:** [laughs] And attempt this because it will be hysterical.

**John:** We live in an age of carbon fiber and nanotechnology. There’s a way that they’re going to be able to do this.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Basically, so the things inside is spinning even though the outside is solid.

**Craig:** But once you… [sighs].

**John:** No, I agree with you that the anchor on the outside is going to have to not spin. But I think there’s a way to do that.

**Craig:** But even inside. I mean, if it’s spinning rotationally in one plane —

**John:** I fully comprehend the challenge.

**Craig:** You see what’s happening? [laughs]

**John:** I do fully. So whenever the cable is inside —

**Craig:** This is awesome. [laughs]

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** I want you to build it. I actually want you to do it and then I want you to turn it on and get hurt and your furniture is everywhere. [laughs] But I —

**John:** I don’t know if this is a Kickstarter or a suicide pact but —

**Craig:** It feels good, man.

**John:** It feels really, really good.

**Craig:** Feels good.

**John:** So that is our structure T-shirt. [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And our third T-shirt actually comes in two different colors. This is the Camp Scriptnotes shirt from way back when we were at camp in 1981. And this just really a chance to relive, god, those memories from so long ago and sort of where this all started.

And so I want to thank Dustin Bocks who designed this recreation of the original Camp Scriptnotes logo. God, I just look at it and the feeling of nostalgia I have. And I mean, so many of our listeners were there at the very beginning.

**Craig:** In so many ways, this podcast is a sad attempt to recapture the glory of a past summer.

**John:** Yeah. That summer of bug juice and mosquito bites and, you know, those crazy moments where Nora Ephron could talk us off the high rope scores. We’ll never quite be able to get back to those highlights. But, I don’t know, something about wearing the T-shirt from that camp will, I don’t know, at least recreate the experience. And people who weren’t around for that time, it’s a chance to sort of experience a little bit of what that was like.

**Craig:** Did you ever work at a summer camp, John?

**John:** I did work at a summer camp. So I was at the Ben Delatour Scout Ranch in Colorado. So that’s where I went to scout camp every summer. And so I was never a counselor there, but I ended up doing a lot of special weeks up there for troop leadership training. I did Order of the Arrow stuff. And so I was essentially an employee because I was back behind the scenes a lot of the times.

**Craig:** I worked at Ivy League Day Camp.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** This was a terrible misnomer. There’s nothing Ivy League about this day camp. I basically worked as a short order cook in the whatever you call it, the snack shop, you know, that thing.

**John:** Oh.

**Craig:** And I learned a lot. I learned a lot that summer, just about life and stuff.

**John:** You were living there and working there?

**Craig:** No, I wasn’t living there.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** It was near my house. I was 16 years old, I went there. Here are the following things I learned that summer. I learned how to cook hamburgers on a grill. I learned how to make certain sandwiches. I learned how to have sex. I learned about drugs. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I learned about Vietnam from —

**John:** Yeah, of course.

**Craig:** From the, this guy had the best name ever, the caretaker. And always, whenever you hear caretaker, you immediately think it’s Jack Nicholson, it’s The Shining. All caretakers are troubled people, I believe, which is why their name is so ironic.

This guy was a Vietnam vet and his name was Bill Cruel. Bill Cruel. But he wasn’t cruel.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** He was cool. He had a tattoo that said “Bill”.

**John:** Did he smoke?

**Craig:** Yeah, man. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And he would teach me all sorts of stuff about Vietnam and that was a hell of a summer.

**John:** That’s great. So you were a townie essentially?

**Craig:** Oh, yeah.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah.

**John:** Townies have the most fun.

**Craig:** No, no. I mean, listen, man, townies do have the most fun. Well first of all, everybody was a townie there. I know I said Ivy League Day Camp, so you think this must be a destination. No. It was not a destination. It was terrible. But, you know, everybody probably has that summer in their life when the world kind of explodes on them. And that was mine. It was awesome.

**John:** Amazing. Well, this is our last podcast for the summer. Labor Day is fast approaching.

**Craig:** Wow. Okay.

**John:** So it feels appropriate that we’re celebrating the end of summer as we talk through summer camp T-shirts and all these opportunities for new gear to wear as we head into the fall.

So all the T-shirts we have up for sale, they are preorders that have to be in by September 17th. That’s a Thursday. So we will remind you on the next two podcasts. But you should probably not wait because inevitably what will happen is on Friday the 18th, we’ll get a bunch of emails saying, “Hey, hey, hey, I really wanted a T-shirt and I forgot the deadline.” And we’re going to say sorry because once we put the order in, the order is in. So September 17th is the deadline. And I want to thank Taino Soba again for his work on the Three-Act Structure shirt.

**Craig:** Yes. Thank you.

**John:** It’s also the end of summer, so therefore, it’s the end of our Featured Fridays in Weekend Read. So Weekend Read is the app I make for iOS for reading screenplays on your phone. Every Friday this summer we’ve been putting up scripts for people to read. We had a bunch of Aline scripts up there. We’ve had different themes. We’ve had pilots. We’ve had Black List scripts. This past weekend we had Dodgeball up there and a bunch of other sports-themed movies.

**Craig:** Oh, Dodgeball.

**John:** So this next week will be our last week. If you have a suggestion for what this final theme should be, there’s still some time for us to scrounge up some scripts and put them in there. So we’re wrapping up Featured Fridays because it’s about time for awards seasons stuff and we have to get ready for the awards season scripts to be in there.

But thank you to everybody who wrote in with their suggestions for Featured Friday stuff and said they like the app. And if you would like to see something in this app for the last week of Featured Friday, please let us know.

I should also say, if you are a person who has a script that is going to be one of those awards season contenders, it might be good to email us or just tweet at me so we can get your script in there and get it in there formatted properly.

Or if you are person who works for these studios who puts out those for your consideration scripts, most of the time we can just link to the one that’s on the website and everything is swell and fantastic. But every once in a while, you guys will put up something that is just like crazy and impossible to format and like one email between us would make things so much happier and easier. If you’re a person like an Andrea Berloff who has a script that’s going to be in consideration for those Awards, email us and let us know.

**Craig:** I don’t think that the Huntsman is going to be out in time for awards season. I’m just — I don’t get it.

**John:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** I mean it just feels like a slam dunk, again, by the way, another slam dunk script.

**John:** Yeah, you’re really just being hurt by timing. I mean I think that is really the reason why you don’t see more Craig Mazin —

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** Awards is timing.

**Craig:** For whatever reason, my films, my oeuvre, doesn’t come out in the November-December months.

**John:** Well, if we decide to do a Featured Friday again in the future, Craig, can we have the Huntsman as one of those scripts?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That would be nice.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** More follow up. Nick writes, “In a recent episode about last looks, John mentioned going through his script to replace two spaces with one space. I was always led to believe that two spaces is standard. Is one space the standard in screenwriting or is it more of an accepted shortcut to trim some length?”

**Craig:** One space, one space, one space.

**John:** It’s now one space. And honestly, it should be one space in everything. So I used to use two spaces. And typewriters used to love two spaces. Everything is now one space. And actually, if you look on the Internet, everything you see on the Internet now is one space because html actually compresses two spaces down to one space. Just go with one space. It will look weird for a day or two and then you’ll get over it and just be one space.

**Craig:** Just be one space, man. We’re all in one space, bro.

**John:** It really is. It’s a shared experience. And once you accept that we’re in a shared experience, life is happier.

**Craig:** There’s no you and me, man. There’s just one space.

**John:** Yeah. In that one space, there are many different countries. And a lot of our questions and comments this week are from China. First off is Cindy in Beijing who writes, “I’m a loyal listener to your podcast Scriptnotes. And I’m also a screenwriter/creative associate working for a film production company in Beijing, China. I listened to your latest podcast, The International Episode, and I would like to share some thoughts with you. Most of the Chinese market discussion you and Craig had was accurate.”

**Craig:** That’s all I needed to know. That’s it. We’re good. We’re good.

**John:** We’re good. Done. End of question.

**Craig:** Thanks. Thanks, Cindy.

**John:** “Just a few facts I’d like to clear/discuss with you. Yes, Monster Hunt made history as the highest grossing Chinese film. One reason is that its production value is much better than most other local films. However, another major factor is, ‘Domestic film protection month in China.’ It’s usually around June to July when the summer vacation starts. During this production month, only Chinese movies will be shown in the theaters making audiences choices during these couple of months very limited. It helps lots of Chinese films to perform well in the box office. Imagine Monster Hunt hits theaters with Mission Impossible 5, Terminator 5 at the same time. It will never do this well. However, it also shows how big and how much potential the Chinese market has.”

**Craig:** Well, we did touch on this, actually, I think, although, I didn’t realize that there was a specific domestic film protection month which turns out to be the biggest movie going month of the year, big shock.

This is part of the issue that we’re dealing with. On the one hand, China, we call China this enormous market. On the other hand, it’s not a market yet. It’s a sort of market. It’s a market when the Chinese government decides it’s a market.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because I don’t know about you, but when I go to the market, it’s open all year long. It doesn’t close so that certain protected goods and services can be offered to certain protected audiences. This is a thing. And China has actually been quite successful and smart about this for themselves. Obviously, this doesn’t have a lot of advantage for us. So it will be interesting to see how long this goes like this.

Now, what confuses things is as Chinese finance continues to proliferate in our market, the question then becomes, well, what is a Chinese movie? In the end, I always feel like money wins out. And if very moneyed Chinese interests say, “Hey, I invested a ton — ” I mean, for instance, take Mission Impossible 5.

**John:** I was going to say.

**Craig:** It is heavily backed by Chinese money and yet the Chinese government won’t allow it to be shown during primetime. At some point, that will get figured out.

**John:** Yeah, I agree.

**Craig:** Should I read this next bit of follow up?

**John:** Great. This is from my friend, Mike Sue. So why don’t you —

**Craig:** Oh, it’s from your friend, Mike Sue. All right. Well, here’s what Mike says. He says, “I just listened to the International Episode and it reminded me of how they turned South Park into a hit show back in my homeland, Taiwan.

“The Simpsons had launched there first, but largely landed flat. For South Park, the translators actually watched the episodes on mute five or six times first and crafted their own storylines to match the show. So instead of Kyle being a Jew,” okay, “he was a… — ” this is amazing, “he was a Taiwan aborigine. They throw in Taiwan pop culture references and jokes about Taiwanese politics all while preserving the irreverent and over the top voice of South Park and it caught on like wildfire. For you guys as creators, I’d be curious whether this level of complete rewrites still follows in Craig’s ignorance is bliss camp or whether it gives you guys the willies and in this case, trading off the creative license for commercial success?” Well, what do you think about that?

**John:** In general, I would say, you know, if I’m not aware of it, I sort of don’t care about it. Where this would become very frustrating is like let’s say, these people in translating this show I’ve made makes some wild, crazy, controversial change that has things in an uproar and suddenly I’m the person dealing with the firestorm over this thing that I didn’t write and I didn’t sign off on is a huge change they’ve made to something.

So if they’re saying, you know, something incredibly inflammatory or racist and it’s perceived that I wrote this thing, that’s the only thing that gives me pause about this.

**Craig:** That racism wasn’t the racism I wrote, I wrote different racism.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** I think it’s both, honestly, Mike. I think that it is ignorance is bliss and it gives me the willies. But, you know, this is one of those things where as Americans, we can only be so focused on the way the work is presented around the world because we have to ultimately serve the English-speaking audience, that’s who we are. We are ourselves English-speaking audience.

Other people will always be there to help us, make sure that things aren’t completely lost in translation. But in those cases where they are, yeah, I think this one’s probably ignorance is bliss and willies.

**John:** And one of the aspects of ignorance is that something I may have written in my movie or on my TV show, which plays completely one way in the American market and like in a not offensive way in the American market or like not so offensive that it’s actually sort of, you know, a cause for riot, could be completely offensive to another culture in a way that I don’t intend at all. So having somebody look at it and intervene in some cases may be the good thing because something that I did not intend at all could come about — which could mean a very literal translation of what I wrote.

**Craig:** Makes sense to me.

**John:** All right. Our first new topic is NDAs because this thing I did this week, I had to sign an NDA. And I don’t end up signing a lot of NDAs. I mean you and I both had to sign an NDA for this thing we went to see a couple of weeks ago, but I would say, I sign maybe four or five a year.

But I’ve been signing probably more of them each year related to film stuff than I ever have before. So while we can’t talk about specific things we signed NDAs for, I wanted to talk about NDAs in general and whether you’ve been encountering them, Craig.

**Craig:** I have, rarely. I’m always surprised when they’re not there. I mean I know that for some of the stuff I did with Todd Philips, we had NDAs. I didn’t sign any NDAs, but I was writing the damn thing. I mean other people had to sign NDAs. I’m surprised, honestly, that they aren’t more widespread.

It may be that they’re just not as enforceable as people hoped them to be. Perhaps, we just don’t have that culture. I mean I don’t know exactly how that actually works in the real world. You know, I mean it’s one thing — I mean we all sign things when we download software and none of us read it. It is the, I guess — what do they call it, a contract of adhesion?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I would — I mean if I were running a company, I’d make everybody sign an NDA every four minutes.

**John:** Yeah. So these terms get conflated and again, this is not a legal show, so we can’t suss out exactly what the boundaries and definitions are, but there’s non-disclosure agreements and there’s non-compete agreements. And non-compete agreements you hear a lot about because it basically says like you can’t work for any of our competitors after a certain period of time. Those things I’ve seen challenged a lot in state law and sometimes in federal law about being, you know, restraint of trade, restraint of ability to like move from one job to another job. And I’m not seeing those things yet.

But what I am seeing our NDAs, particularly if I go in on an animation project, I’m quite frequently having to sign some documents saying like, “You’re going to see some stuff, we’re going to talk about some stuff and you can’t talk about what we’re talking about.” I was thinking about why animation has that more often than live action.

And I think it’s because animation works a little bit more like software development. You have these small teams of people who are working in private on a very long time scale to do one specific project. And they need kind of the freedom to mess up and make mistakes and completely, you know, change course in what they’re doing. And without that, if information about what they were working on got out, it could be completely the wrong information very early on. It could make it seem like the movie is about this thing when actually they just end of scrapping that main character and sub out a whole different thing.

Whereas, a live action movie, by the time you are shooting your movie, that’s kind of the movie you’re making.

**Craig:** That’s possible. I wonder also if this is something that was driven by Pixar. I mean Silicon Valley is NDA obsessed. Pixar is in Silicon Valley basically. It started as a software company. Maybe, it just became a cultural thing once the biggest started doing it, everybody started doing it.

**John:** What I have heard, anecdotally, and this is again, I put up a question on Twitter and people wrote back saying, “I work in visual effects and we’re signing NDAs all the time.” And so again, you know, visual effects kind of comes from that software background and maybe that culture is just more naturally going to happen there. These visual effects companies may be doing previews on a movie and so like they’re sort of making the prototype of the movie and so therefore, that’s a very — it’s coming at a very delicate stage.

Or they’re working on the final version of a movie and they want to make sure that not only does no frames of that movie leak out, but also no information about what actually happens, no spoilers leak out about what actually happens in the movie.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So if you’re making Star Wars, well, of course, I bet everybody on there has a thousand NDAs —
**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** They’re like little laser dots sort of tracking through. And if you see one on your forehead, you know it’s over.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean actually the apparatus to secure ties development is not in and of itself inexpensive. So on huge movies like Star Wars where there’s an enormous desire for information and also an enormous budget, they’re going to be extraordinarily secure. On a small movie where no one’s paying attention, maybe it’s not as important to spend all the money. Even if the script for it should somehow leak online, it’s not a problem because there’s not a voracious demand that’s going to ruin the mass market experience.

**John:** The other thing I have encountered is that certain people who are very high profile where there’s actually monetization and value in people finding out secrets about them, if you are entering their house, if you are working for them, if you are their gardener, you’ll probably be signing an NDA or some other sort of confidentially agreement.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I’ve encountered this with like people who just like they’re remodeling their house and anyone who walks in the house has to sign this agreement. And whether that’s enforceable or not, I don’t know, but I think it’s meant to be just a, by the way, don’t be a jerk, this is what’s going on here.

**Craig:** You didn’t see any cocaine.

**John:** Not a bit. I’ve never seen any cocaine.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** In certain celebrity’s house.

**Craig:** Yeah, she was 18, right?

**John:** Right. Yes. Let’s get to our questions. Justin in Beijing writes, “How does the WGA deal with their writers working overseas? Let’s say a Chinese company wants to hire Craig to write a script.” Craig, congratulations.

**Craig:** Hey.

**John:** “Does the WGA get grumpy because that company is not a signatory? Is Craig on his own for salary, credit residuals and everything else?” There’s a second part, but let’s answer this first part first. So Craig, congratulations on your job, the Chinese company wants to hire you.

**Craig:** Yay, yay. The deal is that the WGA is a labor union. All the power and authority that the labor union has is backed up by federal labor law here in the United States. What that means is that the WGA has absolutely no jurisdiction or authority anywhere else other than in the United States.

So what the WGA can do to me is say, “If you are working on a work area we cover like writing a feature film and you are in the United States working on it, then you have to do it through us, through a WGA contract.” What they can’t do is say, “Oh, are you working in China?” No, they literally can do nothing. Are they grumpy about that? A little bit. They only get grumpy if they feel like people are gaming the system.

Like for instance right now I’m writing a movie for Working Title. Working Title is a British company. Well, if Working Title said, “Oh, and by the way, would you mind just hopping on a plane and writing this in an apartment in London and then going home because this way we can get around the WGA?” That makes them grumpy. And people have tried that, but by and by, no.

So legitimate companies like Working Title would never do that. But if you are working overseas in China, no, you’re not signatory and I am in fact on my own for salary, credit, residuals [laughs], if I get them, and everything else.

**John:** So I’ve heard discussion with actors and with I think they call it like SAG Global Rule One or something where screen actors were feeling like they’re being pressured to sign international contracts so that they wouldn’t enforceable by SAG. But I didn’t really dig into it enough to understand what the beef is. Is that something that we need to be thinking about as writers as well?

**Craig:** Not really. There’s a ton of production going on all over the world. Most writing takes place domestically. So, you know, if Todd and I write a movie and we’re going to go make it in Thailand, we’re still writing it in Los Angeles. And even then, because we’re usually one budget item and people want a certain actor in a certain way — I’m sorry, a certain writer in a certain way and it’s one writer that they’re getting, even if we were writing overseas, very often the company will say, “Oh, you know, look, yes, they are going to be writing in London.”

Let’s say Star Wars, for instance. You know, oh, you’re going to be in London doing a lot of writing but it’s fine. You’re being hired by the American company, it’s a WGA deal. With casts, really what the — was it Global Rule One?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s about everybody else. It’s not about the big movie stars. It’s about the, you know, 10 other people that are being hired and told, “Okay, and you got to get down to Mexico and shoot there and also, we’re not doing it SAG,” because casts can be enormous.

SAG has a ton of problems that are unique to their situation. For us, by and large, this isn’t a big deal. Frankly, we have a bigger problem with the fact that we don’t have feature animation covered in this country. Much bigger problem than this particular issue. But Justin asked the reverse question.

**John:** So what happens if Sony wants to hire a Chinese writer to adapt a project? Do they hire them directly or through a local company? And if they do, would the WGA become involved for things like credit?

**Craig:** That depends. If Sony wants to hire a Chinese writer and they’re okay with the Chinese writer working in China, they can go ahead and hire that writer through one of their non-union subsidiaries. It’s not like Disney or Universal is a WGA signatory. They have these kind of sub-companies that are WGA signatories, precisely so that they can hire writers who are and are not WGA dependent.

Now, practically speaking, if the movie is going to be a Chinese production, this is no big deal. They hire a Chinese writer. She’s in China. She works on the movie there. They shoot the movie there. If they need to rewrite her, they bring in another writer and he rewrites her and he is Chinese, and it’s all there and it’s all non-WGA.

**John:** And so they figure out credit however they want to figure out credit.

**Craig:** However they want to figure it out. But let’s say they just happen to love this Chinese writer because she’s written some amazing stuff and they want her to work on some big movie starring Angelina Jolie. So she’s in China and she’s going to do this first draft. And Sony thinks they’re smart and goes, “Oh, we’ll do it non-union.”

Well, the problem is that eventually Angelina comes along and says, “You know, I really want John August to do that Angelina polish he’s so famous for.” Well, they can’t hire you through the non-union company. So now the project is WGA again. So I suspect that the way the companies work these things is if they think they’re going to want to hire WGA writers for it, they just start it as a WGA gig.

**John:** Yeah. So in this situation described where I come in to rewrite the Angelina Jolie movie, and by the way, I’m happy to, that original writer’s script, you know, for credit purposes, it could get complicated because it could be — is that it would be like based on a screenplay by the Chinese writer or is it just she gets pulled into the WGA and she just becomes the first writer on the project? What would happen?

**Craig:** In the case where somebody starts non-union and then they turn to you and turn it into a union gig, her script becomes source material. She does in fact get a based on a screenplay by credit. That doesn’t come with residuals or separated rights and she won’t be considered a participating writer for the purposes of the WGA credit arbitration.

So it’s a raw deal. And it causes problems along the way. I mean, again, I do think that the companies spend less time trying to game this system than we think. I think they look ahead and they say, “Well, if we are going to end up doing this the normal way, let’s just start it the normal way.”

**John:** Yeah, save some headaches.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** All right, next question. Chad writes, “I have a question about money. How do you get paid for a story credit? How much for an uncredited rewrite?” I like to mix in a question that is just sort of like, you know, completely basic. And so this is one of those completely basic questions that Chad wrote in.

**Craig:** It’s so basic.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well, Chad, first, story credit, screenplay credit, those aren’t salaried items. So we get paid to write. True, we also often negotiate bonuses should we get credit, but the credit is ultimately determined by the WGA. So we get paid a bunch of money, hopefully it’s a lot. And then the WGA decides who gets credit and who doesn’t, which means depending on what your bonuses are like, you might get paid a big bonus for getting story credit. You might get paid nothing for getting your story credit. So just be aware of that.

When you say how much for an uncredited rewrite? Well, that’s essentially what your salary is, right? So the salary is for the writing. The basic structure is we get paid a certain amount of guaranteed money to write. Then there are optional payments that they can make if they choose to keep us for another step of writing. And then after that, there’s bonuses that we may or may not get depending on how we negotiate because they’re not guaranteed by the union. And those bonuses are for sole screenplay credit or typically, they’re for sole screenplay credit or shared screenplay credit. They are almost never for story credit.

**John:** Yeah. Just to underline what Craig said is we get paid to write. And so the time that we are being paid to write, we don’t know if we’re going to be credited on this movie or not. So there’s no difference in salary between a credited rewrite and uncredited rewrite because the time we’re writing the scripts, we’re just getting paid either a flat fee for doing a draft or we’re getting paid a weekly fee for the work we’re doing on the script that week.

And so that weekly fee can vary hugely, as could the fee you’re getting for a draft. That fee you’re getting for a draft is going to be no smaller than the Guild minimums, so, you know, a fair amount of money. But it’s not any different based on whether it’s supposed to be a credited rewrite or an uncredited rewrite. That’s not a thing that exists at the point that you’re being hired.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** You want to take the next one?

**Craig:** Sure. Derek writes, “Following up on your one-handed movie heroes episode, I teach literature to high school students. One of my favorite things about literature of all types is its ability to reflect truth and life experience. Movies have always been my favorite form of literature and I had never considered before your conversation that film characters have motivations that are less complex than real life human beings. I find that notion disappointing, even troubling. Does that mean that film characters tend to be less complex than characters in books?”

**John:** So this was the topic that I brought up. And I would push back and say that I don’t know that movie characters are less complex. But I will say that it’s harder to expose that complexity in a movie than it would be in a book.

It’s that because we only have experience of a character through what we can see and what we can hear, it’s harder to do the deep forensic work inside a character to expose to the audience what is going on inside his or her head. To the degree there’s less complexity, there is less opportunity to explore that complexity because of the nature of the medium.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that I would say that all characters, characters in books, characters in any kind of drama whatsoever are ultimately less complicated than real life human beings because they are purposeful. Most people, in a snapshot of their day, aren’t purposeful. Most people, sadly, when you look at their entire lives, are not purposeful. They existed, did things, moved in erratic, non-productive circles like Eddies in time and then died.

And you could remove them from existence and probably things wouldn’t be that much different. The point of dramatic characters is that you cannot remove them because they are part of a narrative that is purposeful. It’s interesting, I think that Derek is intending the world complex to be complimentary.

But in drama sometimes, actual complexity is boring. What’s more interesting is resolvable complexity or a dialectical complexity where somebody is occupying two interesting sides of a debate. We call that complex. Sometimes I see a movie and it does appear that the movie is trying to simulate the everyday numbing, pointless complexity of real life. And those movies make me sleepy.

**John:** Yeah. I think he is trying to create antonyms between complex and simple. And I would say that the better antonym is complex and focused. And I would say characters in literature are focused, and characters in movies are even more focused generally than characters in books.

In all literature, you are editing down the experience of a lived life to focus on the things that are important to your story. And so literature is, by its definition, going to be less chaotic and complex than real life but that’s sort of the point. You want to be able to expose certain things through editing away the stuff that is not part of the story you’re telling.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s exactly right. I think that’s a very good way of putting it.

**John:** John in Roswell, New Mexico writes, “In dialogue, if a character pronounces an acronym as its own word rather than a string of individually spoken letters, how would you do that on the page without it being confusing in any way for the reader? To give an example of this, there’s a military institute in my town. The acronym of its full name is NMMI. In conversation, people routinely refer to it as NIMMY, turn the acronym into its own word. How would you do that in dialogue?”

**Craig:** Well, a couple of ways. Ideally, you’re going to introduce the NMMI establishment before someone says the word. So in action description, you say EXT.NMMI.DAY, this military institute blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The locals pronounce it NIMMY. And you just tag that in your actions so that from then on, you can write NMMI or just NIMMY, whichever you prefer.

My guess is I probably want the dialogue to say N-I-M-M-Y, NIMMY, just so people don’t have to constantly be like, “Oh, right, that thing where I’m supposed to pronounce it this way but it’s spelled this way.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** If that does not occur, then I think probably what I would do is on the first mention, I would have somebody say, “Oh, yeah, he’s been working at NIMMY for five years. I would write that as N-M-M-I for five years. And then if they continue on, I’d put this parenthetically or then I’d add afterwards “The locals pronounce N-M-M-I NIMMY” in quotes and then everybody after would be N-I-M-M-Y.

**John:** Yeah. I would probably do something similar to that. I would also consider changing the name because I always think about it from the audience’s perspective. And it’s like, “Are they going to get confused about what it is we’re talking about?” And NIMMY sounds kind of silly. And so, you know, unless I could see the sign and someone says, “NIMMY,” then I would get what it is. But I might honestly just pick a different name for what that is just to sort of get past that confusion.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** What Craig is talking about also with the spelling things out is part of the reason why we tend to always spell out numbers in dialogue because sometimes there are multiple ways someone could say that number and they probably want exactly one way. So if you have the number 212, well, do you mean 212 like a phone number or do you mean two hundred and twelve or two-twelve? Just spell out the words so you can get the actual line of dialogue that you want.

**Craig:** Yeah. This brings to mind another way that you can solve this problem is by having someone casually say NIMMY, N-I-M-M-Y, and then someone say, “What’s NIMMY? Oh, NMMI. It’s the military institute.” I hate that personally, but.

**John:** Yeah, but you see that in procedural shows a lot.

**Craig:** By the way, I generally don’t like this sort of thing. I find it cutesy. I find it like I’m sure the people in your town do call it NIMMY but it feels like false cruelness somehow. I don’t know, it just seems weird. Like if you’re going to have a military institute, have the military institute. You know, call it the institute. I don’t know. I don’t like NIMMY.

**John:** Yeah. But Craig also pronounces all the words in SCUBA because he doesn’t like that abbreviation.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a self-contained underwater breathing apparatus. Lowell in New Hampshire writes [laughs] — come on, I get a little credit for pulling that — “I have gotten advice recently that my spec would serve as a great writing sample. But I am not sure what that means. That is to say, what do I do next? Also somewhat related, I heard once that it’s a good idea to write a spec for a TV show that’s off the air as a writing sample.” He likes i.e., “That is, you want a staff job on the new sci-fi you heard something about and so you write a spec on Star Trek: The Next Generation. If that’s true, it’s not clear to me what you might do with it.”

**John:** All right, let’s clear up some things really quickly here. If someone says something would make a great writing sample, that can be a backhanded compliment, kind of saying like, “No one’s ever going to make this as a movie but maybe it’s a writing sample.” But it could also mean like, “Yeah, that’s a good writing sample. It shows good writing.”

So don’t necessarily take that as an insult that someone says it’s a great writing example. It just means that if someone were to read this and might say like, “Oh, this guy could write. I’d be curious to see in writing something that I would actually want to make.”

In terms of specking a TV show, you are listening to some old advice. And so most of the TV showrunners I’ve talked to recently, they do not want to read an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation unless it was some brilliant meta-conceit of an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that would get them fascinated. So, like if you wrote an episode of Bonanza where they encounter a UFO, that might actually be kind of great and fascinating, but they’re probably not looking for a show that’s off the air.

And honestly, back when people were still reading spec episodes of existing shows, they were looking for the shows that were the new hot show. And so, you’d be writing a spec episode of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. You wouldn’t be writing an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Most TV showrunners I have talked to would rather read original scripts, though. They want to see what you can do that’s your own thing, rather than aping someone else’s voice.

**Craig:** Yeah, no question, whatsoever. It’s part of the evolution of television. It’s less of a factory now. There are fewer shows and they exercise more care, I think. So they do want original voices. Also, the reduction of feature films means a lot of former feature writers are now in television. I think a lot of television showrunners started reading feature scripts and going, “Wow. This person is a really good writer.” And then getting rewarded for it when they put them on the show. So —

So yeah, this thing of writing some show that’s either — some other show that’s on the air or god forbid you write a Star Trek: The Next Generation is — that’s like going outside in I don’t know whatever the fashion of the ’20s was. No, that’s probably hip now. Whatever the fashion of 15 years ago is like, what’s the worst? Anyway, you get the point.

**John:** We get the point. Trudy writes, “How do you do research? Is there a process for this? And do studios allow for research time when they hire a writer? Are writers compensated for that time? I’m really just curious about the process of writing a screenplay where a lot of due diligence is required to make something that is representative and accurate.”

**Craig:** Good question. I am currently working on a pilot for HBO that is very research intensive because it’s based on a thing that happened. And do I have a process for this? Yes. It’s the research process. So, remember research methods and how to research things in high school and college? It’s that. It’s research. You start looking things up. I mean, it’s easier now than ever before but you, hopefully, are getting your combination of primary sources, which are people describing things that they personally experienced, secondary sources where people are talking to people who primarily experienced it. You’re getting various view points and perspectives. And you’re getting your facts straight. And you’re being as accurate as you can. It’s just research. Are we compensated for that time? Not specifically. No. We’re paid to write. That’s our job. If we need to research stuff to write, that’s on us. That’s part of our writing process and it’s folded into the cost of us writing for them.

There are times, however, where if necessary, the studio may be willing to fund a research trip.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And that’s something that you have to convince them is necessary. When they hear research trips, sometimes they get excited and sometimes they think, boondoggle. Or if you’re writing your movie about — what was that movie? Couples Retreat, where the couples all went to Bora Bora for marriage therapy. Well, if that’s your research trip, smells a little boondoggly. But if you need to research, I don’t know, the slums of East Berlin, sure. I can see that, yeah.

**John:** So two examples of research trips from my experience. So first was a project I was writing for Paramount a zillion years ago. And it was set in New York City and it’s set like at the Dalton private school and sort or that kind of world. And I really — I’d never been to New York. And so, I needed to go there and do some basic research. And Paramount said, no. It’s like it’s New York, just write New York. And so, Gale Anne Hurd who was my producer, she used her personal miles to fly me to New York. I ended up staying at Doug Liman’s apartment. And it was a great research trip. And so that was the case where the producer stepped up and got me on that trip.

More recently, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is set in a very specific place and I needed to go to that place and do some research there. And I just flew myself there and I put myself up. And there was never going to be a question that I was going to try bill the studio for that because partly they’re paying me enough money, but also, it was a kind of arbitrary choice I was making for why I wanted to have it here. So I needed to defend that choice.

What I do in those research trips I find is you are looking for the geography. You’re looking for specific details, but also, I was looking for people. And so —

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** I was looking to try to meet those people, hear the vocabulary they were using and getting a lot of great contacts so I could have people who I can text at like, you know, seven at night and say like what would be the word for this thing? And they can text me back with what that is. That is really the value of research. And that’s the kind of thing that if I had — I had Stuart do it, it wouldn’t —

**Craig:** It would be terrible.

**John:** It would be terrible if Stuart did it.

**Craig:** Once again, if you had Stuart do it, it would be a disaster.

**John:** Because the thing is, I don’t know what I’m looking for. I’m just listening and like, ah.

**Craig:** I thought it was just because Stuart is doing it.

**John:** No, no. I mean, I — even like a really good Stuart, it wouldn’t work the same way.

**Craig:** [laughs] I don’t even know what that would be like.

**John:** [laughs] Yes, we could imagine, though. We’re screenwriters. You can imagine anything.

**Craig:** It’s crazy. Patrick in San Dimas writes — I love Stuart. “I heard Craig warn a Three-Page Challenger that he was pitched a Time Bandit movie and he was unsure if he was going to do it. At this stage of your career, do you both get pitched specs scripts or ideas by different studios to write? Or are these things your agents have found for you?”

**John:** Great. So, we need to take the word spec script out of there because that actually doesn’t make sense there. So —

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** A spec script is something that Craig and I would write independently. But we are pitched ideas by studios, by producers. They say like, “Hey, we want to make a movie based on this thing or about this idea.” And sometimes they’ll approach me directly if I have a relationship, but more likely they will call my agent David Kramer and David Kramer will call and say like, “Hey, they want to do this thing.” And I’ll think like, “Do I want to do that thing?” And about half of the time, I’ll say, “No, that’s just not a world I’m interested in.” Or I’ll say like, “I don’t know what that is, but I’ll look it up.” And then, I will pass on it a few days later.

But sometimes, it’s a really great idea. And then I go in for the meeting and that becomes a thing. So that was Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, which I was like, “Yeah. You know what, I kind of know what that is, let me look into it.” And then I hop on the phone and that happens.

So I would say at this point of my career, a significant majority of the stuff I end up being paid to write is that kind of thing, where someone has pitched me, this is either a project we own, it’s a book we want to adapt or it’s this — a story world we want someone to approach.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s basically the way it goes. I mean, I — seems like it’s half and half for me, in terms of whether somebody has something that they give to my agent or they just call — I don’t know. I must be the most accessible guy because people are calling me all the time. Or sending me emails all the time saying, “What about this? What about this?” And I always think like, you know, it would be better if everything did go through an agent because one of the benefits of an agent is that you don’t have to have that awkward conversation.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know. I mean, look, sometimes, somebody pitches you something and you just know within four seconds, you just don’t want do it. Or you can’t do it. And you find yourself, you know, I don’t like saying no at all.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** I mean, there’s a part of me that wants to do everything anyway. And just because, why not? Let’s see, you know. But you can’t.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** But yes, at this stage of our careers, we get pitched stuff all the time to rewrite or to write. And it’s very flattering. And it is — it’s funny. It just sort of happens at some point, you know. You spend of a lot of time, many years, waiting for it to happen in the way you imagined it happening. And then it happens. And soon enough, it will un-happen and then you quit.

**John:** Yes, exactly, when they stop calling you about that, you know, would you want to make remake of this? And you’re like, “Well, of course not.” And then like, “Wait. Why aren’t you calling me about that anymore?”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I think that’s one of those fascinating things. When we get off the air, I’m going to ask you whether you got a call about a remake of a specific TV show.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** And I will judge my worth and your worth, based on which of us got the call first.

**Craig:** [laughs] Okay. Sounds good. I’m excited. What do we have next?

**John:** Kathel in Dublin writes —

**Craig:** Kathel.

**John:** “I am wondering whether to set my next screenplay in the 1970s or modern day. It’s a buddy/fish out of water comedy. And while the time period won’t change the concept or story, it will impact how I write some scenes.”

**Craig:** Will it? Will setting it in the modern day or the 1970s impact [laughs] how you write some scenes? Will it? Huh? This is a very strange question.

**John:** I think it’s actually really easy question to answer.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, it is an easy question, which is — you better — you need to set it in the 1970s or in modern day. It belongs somewhere. It wants to be in a time. It has to be specific. You just can’t go, “No, it could be 70s.” I just feel like, well, why answer your question, I’m wondering whether to set my next screenplay in the 1970s, or ’80s, or ’90s or modern day, or ’40s, or ’50s or the middle ages. Why the 70s?

**John:** What I find so fascinating is like my idea is so unformed that I’m emailing you but I don’t even kind of know the basic nature of this idea. Because it can’t be. The same idea really couldn’t be in both places. Like if the email had come in saying like, “I have this whole approach, which I’m really excited about, like the 1970s of it all. And yet, I’m worried that it’s going to be so locked down in ’70s. I could also do it in this way, which obviously changes a lot of things. I’m really torn. Or if the question was how much more difficult am I making my life by setting this in the ’70s versus the modern day? That email, I kind of get, but to have it be so unformed is fascinating to me, so —

**Craig:** it’s bizarre. Look, the time period is one of the fundamental elements of your story. For instance, John and I recently watched Diary of a Teenage Girl, last podcast episode.

**John:** We did a podcast about it. Yes, yes.

**Craig:** We interviewed Mari Heller, the great Mari Heller. Now, that needed to be in the ’70s. I felt it. Because I didn’t think — I don’t think I would have believed a lot of what happened there had it happened now.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It felt like it needed to be a product of a time that was both sexually adventurous and also sexually naïve. It needed both. It needed to be before AIDS for instance.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And it needed to be before the kind of morality panic of the ’80s. You need to have this movie now or in the ’70s? Need to. You just don’t know which, because I don’t think you’ve thought this through well enough.

**John:** So if the question from Kathel in Dublin had been, “Given your druthers, should a movie be set in the 1970s or modern day?” I would say, in general, modern day. Because I think the things you are making your life more difficult about by setting it in the 1970s are substantial. And sometimes, a movie really wants to be set in ’70s. But if it doesn’t really want to be set in the ’70s, then set it in modern day.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that that modern day is the default.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So you need to want it to be period for a reason. All right.

**John:** Pick good defaults.

**Craig:** Pick good defaults. Harris from Brooklyn writes — hey, Brooklyn, what’s up? “I have made two short films so far that I’ve written and directed. I’m interested in doing both of those things, writing and directing. The thing is, I don’t know if I should focus on writing my full length screenplay or write and actually make my short films.”

**John:** So Harris in Brooklyn, you’ve already made two short films. That’s good. We encourage people to write things and direct things, so they actually understand what the process of writing and directing things consists of. If you have not yet written a feature length screenplay, you should probably write a feature length screenplay just so you know what that is and what that whole experience and process is. Because you could make 17 short films, after film number eight, I don’t think that’s going to help you write a full feature length screenplay or get a movie made. That’s just my first instinct.

**Craig:** It’s sort of an unanswerable question. I don’t know if you should focus on writing your full length screenplay or continuing to write and make your short films because I don’t know what your — I don’t know what you’re good at.

**John:** Does this guy want to be a music video director? Then he should make more short films. Does he want to be feature screenwriter? He should probably write a screenplay.

**Craig:** Yeah, if you want to make feature films, you better start getting into feature films, sure. But, you know, you — I’m sure are aware, Harris, that it’s one thing to write a short film script and then go shoot it because it’s manageable. It’s another to go shoot a feature length screenplay. You have experience now, so it is possible for you to write a feature length screenplay that is shootable. I would write so that you can make it, because ultimately, there is no better currency than a film. It’s better currency than a script.

**John:** I agree. Our last question comes from Jay. “I’m always fascinated with going to Wikipedia and finding out what the budget for a movie was against how much it grossed. But then I heard somewhere, maybe on your podcast, that movies have to gross at least double the budget of their movie to break even. But what exactly does that mean? In terms of screenwriters, producers, et cetera, do they get piece of the backend? Or is that just the studio behind the film? I’m basically curious of the entire process of how everyone involved [laughs] in the movie makes money?”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** So I just figured it would be a good last question to throw in here.

**Craig:** So first, there was an enormous explosion in space. And stars were formed. Then, it’s the — okay. So there’s a lot here. We can’t answer it all at once. I think we’ve actually answered a lot of this before. But let me just go through it quickly.

You’re fascinated with going to Wikipedia and finding out what the budget for a movie was against how much it grossed. Well, maybe, be a little less fascinated with that. It’s just so — who cares? Okay. But —

**John:** You don’t know that the budget that Wikipedia lists is at all accurate.

**Craig:** Yes, it’s not. I guarantee you, it’s not. No budget ever is accurate. I believe that. No budget that is ever published anywhere is accurate. The budget that they show us, that when we’re making the movie, I don’t believe is accurate. [laughs] So all those numbers are baloney, okay? So just know that.

Two, against how much it grossed. Theatrically or grossed theatrically, plus DVD, plus rentals, plus Internet. What does gross even mean? Okay? So there’s that.

You heard somewhere, maybe on our podcast, the movies have to gross at least double the budget of the movie to break even. There’s a rule of thumb. That if you can gross double your budget theatrically, then eventually you’ll be okay. Why double? Because the movie costs money, but then the advertising of a movie costs almost as much — sometimes more money than the movie costs. A lot of times, more money than the movies costs. Then, they have to distribute the movie which costs money as well.

And remember, advertising isn’t just in the United States, it’s everywhere all over the world. And then, all the overhead that goes into play as well, all the salaries of the many, many people that work at the studio in marketing, in distribution and development, all the rest.

And there’s things like taxes, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And of course, the money that was reported as the theatrical gross, that doesn’t all go to the studio. The theaters take a big cut of that as well. Now, you ask, in terms of screenwriters, producers, do they get a piece of backend or is that just the studio behind the film? Screenwriters do not get backend. If a screenwriter is working as a producer or director on the film, then optionally, they may be able to get a real backend. But screenwriters just doing the screenwriting job, no, they don’t get real backend.

Producers almost exclusively get backend, meaning they don’t get paid much for developing the project. They often have fees for making the movie. And then those fees are applied against a backend, so it’s recoupable against a backend. And then if it goes over that amount, then they get more.

So, yes, big movie stars, big producers, big directors can get a piece of the backend. Their salaries are applied against it.

**John:** We can stop there.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that that’s good.

**John:** That’s good. It’s a good introduction to this. But I will say there are previous episodes, we’ll try to put links to some of those previous episodes, where we talk about sort of how money works in the business. But it’s a topic for a book, not a topic for the last question of the show.

**Craig:** Uh-huh.

**John:** Let’s do our One Cool Things. Craig, I see something called Dead Synchronicity. What’s that?

**Craig:** Dead Synchronicity is a game that is out for Mac, PC and iOS and possibly, possibly Android, although who cares about Android? And I liked it. I liked it a lot. I played it. I thought it was really, really good. It’s an interesting game. It comes from a company in Spain. I think three Spanish brothers actually are the principals of the company.

And it’s not revolutionary game play. It’s basically a point and click puzzle adventure. I love these point and click adventures where the game structure basically is find things and figure out where to use them. Very old school way of doing things.

What made this game interesting for me was that it was incredibly dark. It’s got a lot of sci-fi mumbo jumbo. The sci-fi story, in and of itself, is bordering on incoherent. It promises a sequel, which I’ll play. But what blew my mind about the game was one moment [laughs], one moment in particular, where I thought, “I can’t believe the balls on these guys — ”

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** “For putting this in a game.” It is gross, and disturbing, and awesome. And there were a lot of gross, disturbing, and awesome things in it. But there was one moment where I went, “Wow, this is getting sick.” And you just don’t see that very often juxtaposed with the point and click graphic adventure. So I really enjoyed it. It is dark and disturbing, so trigger warning.

**John:** Okay. My One Cool Thing is Mr. Robot, which is a show on USA. It’s a summer series that I heard people talking about and then I didn’t start watching and it’s like, “You know what, I’ll start watching it.” It is fantastic. And so I would strongly recommend that really everybody listening to this podcast at least watch the pilot episode because I thought it was just terrifically written by the guy Sam Esmail who I’ve never encountered before.

The pilot is terrifically directed. This guy, creator of the show, also directed the second episode. It was just terrifically done as well. The conceit of the show is you have a guy who is a computer security technology expert who is definitely on one of Craig’s spectrums.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** He is an incredibly dark central character to try to follow and yet he’s fascinating. And so at the top of the show, we were talking about Clueless and how Cher might seem like a sociopath if you didn’t have her voiceover. Same situation with this guy. He has voiceover and yet the conceit behind his voiceover is he’s talking to a person he knows is an imaginary person, and that is you.

And so he will address you directly through his voiceover. And it ends up becoming incredibly important and helpful to the show. It’s all entirely from his point of view and to the degree to which things within the world have bent to sort of his point of view. And so the villainess corporation has a giant E. He calls it Evil Corp and then from that point forward, every time you see it and everyone who refers to it calls it Evil Corp, which I think is just great.

It’s such a great example of how a strong central character can drive not just the plot but really the world of a show. So I strongly recommend Mr. Robot on USA.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** Okay. You will find links to most of the things we talked about on the show today at the show page at johnaugust.com/scriptnotes or /podcast, both will get you there. Also, while on johnaugust.com, you should go visit the store, store.johnaugust.com where you can see the four Scriptnotes T-shirts and pick your favorite. Pick a couple if you want to.

Again, these are all preorders. You only have about two-and-a-half weeks to order these shirts. Then we will print them, we will package them up, we will send them to your house. They will be on your body in time for the Austin Film Festival if nothing goes horribly wrong. And I don’t think anything will go horribly wrong.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Our show is produced by Stuart Friedel.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Thank you, Matthew. Our outro this week comes from Duncan Pflaster. If you have an outro for our show, you can write in to us at ask@johnaugust.com with a link to your outro. That same address is a great place to write questions like the ones we answered today. And so ask@johnaugust.com. Little short things are great on Twitter. Craig is @clmazin, I am @johnaugust. And that is our show this week.

**Craig:** Thanks, John.

**John:** See you next week.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [Scriptnotes shirts are available for pre-order in the John August Store](http://store.johnaugust.com/)
* [Dewalt hex bit set](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000628SO2/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) and a [magnetic bit extensions set](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004V3TQP2/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* This is the last week of the summer for [Featured Fridays](http://johnaugust.com/2015/weekend-read-featured-fridays) on [Weekend Read](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/weekendread/)
* Scriptnotes, 130: [Period space](http://johnaugust.com/2014/period-space)
* [South Park popularity is soaring in Taiwan](http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2000-12-28/features/0012280062_1_taiwan-south-park-four-musketeers) from The Baltimore Sun
* [Non-disclosure agreements](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-disclosure_agreement) on Wikipedia
* Screenwriting.io on [handling numbers in dialogue](http://screenwriting.io/how-should-you-handle-numbers-or-confusing-jargon-in-dialogue/)
* Screenwriting.io on [spec scripts](http://screenwriting.io/what-is-a-%E2%80%9Cspec-script%E2%80%9D/)
* Scriptnotes, 11: [How movie money works](http://johnaugust.com/2011/how-movie-money-works)
* [Dead Synchronicity](http://www.deadsynchronicity.com/en/home/)
* [Mr. Robot](http://www.usanetwork.com/mrrobot) on USA
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Duncan Pflaster ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))